Nomination of Antony John Blinken

Floor Speech

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Mr. RISCH. Mr. President, I bring to the floor this morning the nomination of Tony Blinken to be Secretary of State. He has been nominated, of course, by President Biden, and this is brought by Senator Menendez and me. We have had the honored privilege of working together to move as rapidly as we could Mr. Blinken's nomination. Obviously, these things do take some time, and we are fortunate to be able to bring it as quickly as we have to the floor.

This is, in my judgment, certainly the most important nominee that there will be to the President's Cabinet in light of a number of things but not the least of which is they are in the line of succession for the Presidency.

Mr. Blinken has a long and distinguished history when it comes to statecraft and foreign relations matters. Certainly, he is very qualified for this job. Obviously, we don't agree on all things. Nobody ever does.

I will say that there are 200 countries, approximately, on the planet, and each one of them has unique and very distinguished issues.

In speaking with Mr. Blinken on these matters, I find that there is a tremendous amount of agreement that he and I have. Obviously, whenever these things happen, there are areas of disagreement, and obviously the media and a lot of people focus on these.

I should mention that at least one of those--Iran--is a very wide disagreement that we have. In my judgment, the JCPOA was a colossal failure and a real blunder for American policy overseas. In talking with Mr. Blinken, he does not share that view, and obviously he is going to work with the President, carrying the President's water to get us back into the JCPOA. I think that is a mistake. We have talked about this at length, and certainly whatever the consequences of that are, those who do it are going to have to live with it.

I can state that this is not a partisan issue. There are people on both sides of the aisle who have real reservations about going back into the JCPOA, particularly if there aren't very significant sideboards put on that. The effort is going to be made, and we will advise as we can and go down that pike.

Again, I say that this is one issue. Out of the many, many issues that we discussed, there was very little--in fact, no daylight between us on some of them. A good example of that would be Turkey. I think Mr. Blinken shares my reservations about Turkey, and, again, the vast majority of this body, the U.S. Senate, has deep, deep reservations about the direction that Turkey is going.

In any event, we need a Secretary of State, and this is the person for the job.

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