Majority Leader | Press Release | Press Releases | THE NE...Skip to primary navigation Skip to content×Close THE NEWSROOMRemarks Press Releases The Leader Board Op-Eds Videos SENATE RESOURCESRepublican Senators Committees Congressional Record Congress.gov Senate Floor Webcast ABOUT LEADER THUNE×Close THE NEWSROOMRemarks Press Releases The Leader Board Op-Eds Videos SENATE RESOURCESRepublican Senators Committees Congressional Record Congress.gov Senate Floor Webcast ABOUT LEADER THUNExxsearchxMENUFacebookXInstagramFacebookXInstagramVisit Leader Thune's South Dakota Site Here THE NEWSROOMRemarks Press Releases The Leader Board Op-Eds Videos SENATE RESOURCESRepublican Senators Committees Congressional Record Congress.gov Senate Floor Webcast ABOUT LEADER THUNExxsearchxMENUHomeTHE NEWSROOMPress Releases12.17.25Thune Joins The Hugh Hewitt Show“[I]t’s about making the country more prosperous, and I think the tax policy will be really key to that.” Click here to listen the interview.WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) today joined the Hugh Hewitt show.On confirming President Trump’s nominees:“Democrats took unprecedented steps to basically blow up the nominations process. President Trump is the first president in history who didn’t have one of his nominees to a position in his administration confirmed either by voice vote or unanimous consent in the Senate, which is a way of taking noncontroversial nominees and being able to move them to get them in their position.“The Democrats were so dug-in fighting President Trump that even the most noncontroversial positions in his administration, they forced us to do the long way. So we spent the first six months doing it the long way. And it just got to a point where … the president is sitting there, he’s got all these vacant positions, [and] he can’t … run the government because he doesn’t have his people in place. And I think when people vote for a president, that’s what they’re voting for. They want him to be able to assemble his team and get them in place. So we made some tweaks and changes in the rules that enable us to move them now in stacks, and we’ve got a big stack today.” On Senate Republicans’ accomplishments:“The president’s agenda, for the most part, was all accomplished in that One Big Beautiful Bill. Whether it’s national security or the border, energy, tax policy … school choice has been a priority for the movement for a long time. Newborn accounts, childcare … we basically threw the farm bill in the One Big Beautiful Bill too, so.“It actually included the biggest spending reduction, literally, in history, and something that if you’re a fiscal conservative like I am, we’re really proud to be able to point to … It packs so much into one big piece of legislation, and … getting that across the finish line was a Herculean task.”[…]“We’ve processed the president’s noms, and we’ve done 24 … Congressional Review Act resolutions of disapproval, which undoes a lot of the Biden damage by repealing a lot of the burdensome Biden regulations, and frees up energy production in this country and a whole range of other things.“We’ve had some bipartisan accomplishments too. So it’s been busy … in terms of volume of votes and time in session, all that too. But [it’s been] very productive … doing it all in one big … package …” On the Working Families Tax Cuts:“I always tell people, if you don’t get national security right, the rest is conversation. So we really made up for the Biden years, when they weren’t funding the military. We put money in there to build a wall at the border and to close the border, which the president has effectively and successfully done … We needed to make sure that we had not only border wall money, but we had personnel for Border Patrol agents, detention facilities, all the things that we needed to do that were backed up …“And then it’s about making the country more prosperous, and I think the tax policy will be really key to that. I would argue that not only extending the policies from 2017, which included lower rates for families and doubling the child tax credit, and near doubling the standard deduction, and there’s a 199A deduction for small businesses in there … We also did no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, reduced taxes, you know, for seniors on Social Security. “I think the tax policy in and of itself is going to be enormously stimulative to the economy. You look at … bonus depreciation, interest deductibility … R&D expensing, those are all things that, on the business side, I think it’s going to lead to growth in the economy and better-paying jobs. So I think that people are going to see a better future as a result of the economic pieces of it.“And then there’s a whole … bunch of other things … in there … having to do with … policies that we think are consistent with a conservative view of how this country ought to be run … The school choice policies have been something that’ve been a part of our agenda for a long time. You look at these newborn accounts and what a difference that will make in the lives of families and young people who are being born today, to be able to put money aside for their futures. Those are all incentives in this bill that I think are just going to lead to a better quality of life for a lot of the American people.”On cutting waste, fraud, and abuse:“We did do some of this in the One Big Beautiful Bill … rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. We did that in the Medicaid program, we put work requirements in … And then there were states [that] figured out how to game the program and so we clamped down on some of that. We achieved a significant amount of savings there. And then we put in this Rural Hospital Transformation Fund, which if you … represent rural hospitals like I do, I think the states are going to take full advantage of that in trying to ensure that we’ve got health care that’s accessible to people all across the country, including in rural areas.”PrintEmailTweetNextPreviousTHE NEWSROOMSENATE RESOURCESABOUT LEADER THUNEFacebookXInstagram
