Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

Mrs. McCASKILL. Mr. President, I came to the floor on Tuesday of this week to do something I do not think had been done before under the rules. We had a new law that went into effect in the early part of 2007 that gave us a mechanism that was supposed to stop secret holds. We are all waiting to see if by moving all of the nominations by unanimous consent, in fact, the owners of the secret holds step forward.

While we wait to see if the rule that was designed and passed into law works, a bunch of us have been talking. The folks who have been talking about this are the newest Members of the Senate in the Democratic Party. There are 21 of us who have arrived in the Senate sometime between now and January of 2007. It is a pretty big group of Senators.

In discussing the secret holds with my colleagues who have been here for a fairly short period of time, we decided: Why don't we just quit doing them? Let's quit worrying about whether you are identifying yourself in 6 days, whether you are going to play the switcheroo, pull your secret hold and put on another secret hold. Let's just stop it. No more secret holds.

We now have drafted a letter to Leader Reid and Leader McConnell, and we have said: First, we will not do secret holds. We are out of the business of secret holds. We are not going to do them. Second, we want the Senate to pass a rule that prohibits them entirely.

If a Senator wants to hold somebody, fine, but say who they are and why they are doing it. If a Senator wants to vote against somebody, that is their right. But this notion that they can, behind closed doors, do some kind of secret negotiation to get something they want from an agency--let's be honest about it; that is what a lot of this is. It is getting leverage, secretly getting leverage for something they want. Those are not appropriate secrets for the public business.

We have 80 secret holds right now. About 76 of those are Republican secret holds; 4 are Democratic secret holds. By the way, all 80 of the ones on which I made the unanimous consent request came out of committee unanimously. We even checked on the voice votes to make sure no one said no in committee. There were no ``no'' votes. These 80 nominees were completely unopposed out of committee.

They are everything from the Ambassador to Syria to U.S. marshals to U.S. attorneys. These are people who need to get to work. They are going to be confirmed. They are all going to be confirmed. We need to get this done. We need to stop secret holds. We need to get these people confirmed. We need to change the way we do business around here.

I, once again, give a shout-out to Senator Wyden and Senator Grassley who worked on this issue for a number of years. We are going to open this letter to all Members of the Senate and, hopefully, before we find out--we are all waiting to see what happens in the 6 days that are looming for all these secret holds, if people step up into the sunshine. If they do not, in the meantime we, hopefully, will get unanimous support from Senators that secret holds are now out of fashion and no longer going to be tolerated in the Senate.

Mr. President, I yield the floor for my colleague from Colorado, Senator Bennet.

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