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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, our Navy and Marine Corps are the best in the world, but we face many challenges across the globe. We need to build new ships and maintain our current fleet. We need to recruit, train, and equip a force necessary to deter conflict, especially in the Indo-Pacific. We need to help keep sea lanes open for commerce and build deeper relationships with our allies and our partners.
To make sure that the Navy is able to carry out all military and civilian objectives, we allocate a lot of money for its budget. A Comptroller is critical to ensuring the accountability of taxpayer dollars and to keeping the Navy's readiness at the highest level.
Russell Rumbaugh, the nominee for this position, will bring firsthand knowledge to the job, having previously served as both special assistant to the Director and as an operations research analyst in the Secretary of Defense's Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Office.
In having served as an Army infantry officer, Mr. Rumbaugh has had a unique perspective that will help him to support and strengthen our Navy, but his nomination is stuck because the Senator from Missouri is blocking it over disagreements, not with Russell Rumbaugh and not even necessarily with the Department of the Navy but with the Biden administration and Afghanistan policy.
I know because we have been here before, actually, Senator Hawley and I, I think, three times. This is the third time. I know what he is going to do today. I am going to make a unanimous consent request that we get the Navy a Comptroller, and he is going to say: No. I want a special committee on the Afghanistan withdrawal.
I am not the Armed Services chairman, and I am not the majority leader. I can't authorize that kind of thing. In any case, the House Armed Services Committee is absolutely, under a presumed Speaker McCarthy, going to do tons of oversight in this space.
My basic complaint about this tactic is that it is not what this power is for. It is not what this power is for. We are all given the ability to block a nominee. It is supposed to be used sparingly and not in the fashion that it is being used by the Senator from Missouri. The Senator from Missouri, essentially, has got a total blanket hold. Sometimes, he allows the body to vote on somebody, but the demand, which he knows will never be accepted, remains. Otherwise, he will block the logistics guy at the Army; he will block the fiscal guy at the Navy; he has blocked numerous Department of Defense nominees not because of their qualifications and not because of any particular dispute regarding the nominee but because he is mad about the Afghanistan withdrawal. Lots of people are mad about the Afghanistan withdrawal, but only Senator Hawley does this.
I would just submit that the right way to influence foreign policy is on the floor as an amendment to the Defense authorization or to the State Department authorization or on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or on the Senate Armed Services Committee, but not just by stomping your feet and disabling the Department of Defense from doing the work that it needs to do.
I just got out of a meeting. I came right out of this meeting with the Chief of Naval Operations. We talked a little bit about this position, and he talked to me about how important it was. So Senator Hawley and I may have a different view about the Afghanistan withdrawal, but I don't understand what Russell Rumbaugh has to do with this. He is an eminently qualified person. I don't even think the Senator from Missouri is alleging that this guy couldn't do the job or shouldn't do the job. It is just that he is mad about something else.
So we have got to break this logjam. The Senator from Missouri has been doing this for, well, more than a year now, and the Department of Defense itself is suffering. We have exchanged some pretty tough words, but I just hope that he sees fit to separate his foreign policy objections around Joe Biden being President and Secretary Austin and Secretary Blinken. Fair enough. It is a free country. He is a Republican; I am a Democrat. These are the kinds of fights that we have. But why block the Comptroller from the Navy? It just makes no sense to me.
972, R. Russell Rumbaugh, to be an Assistant Secretary of the Navy; that the Senate vote on the nomination without intervening action or debate; that if confirmed, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table; and that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.
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Mr. SCHATZ. It is fine. Go ahead.
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Mr. SCHATZ. The problem is that the Senator from Missouri is asking for something that he knows I can't agree to, and he is blocking the Comptroller of the U.S. Navy because he is mad about something else. I mean, it is very clear what he is mad about, and he has come in with his set speech about what he is mad about.
The fundamental point here is that this is not the way to be a Member of the U.S. Senate.
I said: If you want to get a hearing, go try to get a hearing. Introduce a bill. Get a Democratic cosponsor. Make the case. Work it through the committee process.
He has failed on that, and he has failed on this issue. He doesn't have other people with him, so he is pitching a fit. And the bummer about this is that it is not me who suffers; it is not one party or the other who suffers; it is the taxpayer. In this instance, it is the Department of the Navy that will lack a Comptroller because Josh Hawley is not getting his way.
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