Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., on Tuesday called for an end to Democrats’ obstruction of President Donald Trump’s nominees as he elaborated on his plan to accelerate the rate at which those nominees are confirmed in the Senate.
“This is a business model that does not work when it comes to running and operating the government, and that’s why it’s got to be fixed,” Thune declared.
The Senate majority leader explained at a Tuesday press conference that he is moving forward with an effort to change the Senate rules to allow batches of Trump nominees to be confirmed together. The hope is that the Senate rules reform will allow the scores of presidential nominations waiting for confirmation votes in the upper chamber to get through the Senate.
Those appointments are critical to giving President Donald Trump the necessary personnel to enact his agenda—and to allow the upper chamber to focus on other priorities.
“As the Senate spends more of its time working on nominations, this leaves less time for legislating on issues that are important to the American people,” Thune noted in a floor speech Monday.
The South Dakota senator also said on Tuesday that without a reform of the Senate rules, the legislative body would have to cast more votes in the remaining 3-1/2 months of the calendar year than senators had since they began their current legislative session in January. And that effort would be to simply clear out the backlog of Trump nominees under consideration by the Senate.
It would likely be compounded by any new nominees Trump could send to the upper chamber during that time.
Senate Republicans have faced an arguably unprecedented level of obstruction from Senate Democrats when it comes to getting Trump’s nominees confirmed. At this point, there have been zero civilian nominees appointed by Trump during his second term that have been confirmed by voice vote or unanimous consent.
Another option on the table for Senate Republicans if the batch method still doesn’t push through all of the president’s administration picks is recess appointments.
The Senate could recess itself for at least 10 days, allowing the president to make recess appointments to fully staff his administration. That idea has been supported by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. Recess appointments are not subject to Senate confirmation votes and can in certain instances last for about two years.
Johnson discussed the need for Senate action in an interview with The Daily Signal’s Tony Kinnett in July.
“And so I think the easiest way out of this is, literally, go into recess and have President Donald Trump do recess appointments. Once he’s done that, when we come back in, we can just do those confirmations in the normal course of business, but we would get these people in place. They can serve for a year. That would be pretty significant versus leading these agencies without their political appointees,” the Wisconsin senator explained.
Even accounting for persistent Democrat obstruction, as of Tuesday, the Senate had confirmed 138 civilian nominees, which is a greater number than at the same point during the first Trump presidency. Thune has also managed to confirm all of the president’s Cabinet officials that lead executive departments and pass the budget reconciliation bill that secured funding for border security and defense.
There are about 1,300 positions in the federal government that necessitate confirmation by the Senate. According to The Washington Post and the Partnership for Public Service, 253 nominees of the 822 government jobs it is tracking were under consideration by the Senate as of Sept. 5.
