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Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, sometime today, we are voting on the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard. She is going to be Director of National Intelligence after she is confirmed.

Until she was nominated, I only knew her from seeing her in media sound bites and what other people wrote about her. She came to my office, and we had a very good, very substantive conversation. I determined that she is very smart and obviously an articulate person.

In our discussion, we covered many of her past statements on various policy matters, and she was able to clarify what the media got right and what the media got wrong.

Obviously, since she served in the Congress of the United States as a Democrat, I and she may not agree on every policy. However, Representative Gabbard made clear that she does not see her position as Director of National Intelligence as a policymaking position. She understands that President Trump is the one who was elected. As Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard's job will be simply to make sure that the intelligence community is able to provide the best unbiased information to help President Trump make the proper decisions.

She and I also spoke about some of my past oversight work regarding the intelligence community. I have had mixed results in getting legitimate information that I have sought, depending upon who was in that particular position. For instance, when Rick Grenell became the Acting Director of National Intelligence, I suddenly and surprisingly got material that I had asked for after being totally stonewalled by previous Directors of National Intelligence.

Based on my conversation, I expect Tulsi Gabbard, along with CIA Director Ratcliffe, will ensure that the intelligence community will be forthcoming and fully responsible to Congress as we in Congress exercise our constitutional responsibility not only to pass laws and appropriate money but to be a check on the executive branch of government to see that a President--whether that President is Republican or Democrat--faithfully executes the laws as required by the Congress of the United States.

On another matter, yesterday, I took a minute or two to address the Senate to remind my other 99 Senators--which I do not have to remind the members of the Senate Agriculture Committee--that our nominee for Secretary of Agriculture, Mrs. Rollins, was voted out of committee unanimously. You would think, then, that if both Republicans and Democrats think that Mrs. Rollins is the proper person to be Secretary of Agriculture, she would be quickly approved for that position unanimously here in the U.S. Senate and maybe even be lucky enough to do it on a voice vote.

Now, I don't know what is going to happen, but I do know that we are going to be sitting around the U.S. Senate today for several hours to see whether we are going to vote on Ms. Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence or we are going to have that disposed of very quickly and get down to work.

But the people in this country send us to the U.S. Senate to actually do work. And when you are sitting around just waiting for a decision from the minority of when they are going to allow us to vote on this particular nomination or how we are going to handle Mrs. Rollins for Secretary of Agriculture, nothing is getting done, and we are wasting a lot of the taxpayers' time with a lot of important decisions that have to be made, even after we approve all the members of the Cabinet.

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