Democrats have embraced crime by rebuffing President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and soon, perhaps, Chicago. The party that pushes cashless bail and sanctuary cities for illegal aliens is also needlessly blocking the Senate confirmation of 10 U.S. attorneys nominated by President Donald Trump.
On Wednesday Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked for a unanimous consent vote to quickly confirm those 10 U.S. attorneys, the top federal law enforcement officials in each jurisdiction, who have already been questioned and approved by the Judiciary Committee. No dice. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., “objected to Grassley’s request.”
So instead of a quick, single voice vote on the block of 10 nominees, which is the tradition for noncontroversial nominees, the Senate will have to hold a roll call vote for each nominee individually.
It will require discussion about each nominee, then a cloture vote to end discussion and force a vote, then the actual confirmation vote. It will take hours. And considering there are roughly 1,000 Trump nominees who need Senate confirmation in various positions, getting them all approved will take months of valuable Senate floor time.
Say each nominee takes an hour to approve. (It will be longer, but for the ease of math: one hour). Now let’s say the Senate works as hard as Americans and is in session 40 hours a week. (Stop laughing. Of course, it is not realistic.) If the Senate does nothing but approve Trump’s nominees for 40 hours a week, it would take about 25 weeks (roughly six months) to confirm Trump’s nominees, inching forward with uncooperative Democrats.
Like a bowel packed with too much fiber, Senate Democrats are obstructing President Donald Trump’s nominations as part of a larger strategy to delay and deny movement of Trump’s agenda. Minority Democrats would love to keep majority Republicans busy with nominations Democrats don’t actually oppose. They just want to wind down the clock until they are in power again.
Before Trump made a single nomination for U.S. attorney, Durbin put a “blanket hold” on all 93 U.S. attorney positions, meaning he is rejecting and planning to slow the votes for people who have not even been nominated yet. Which is weird, because when Joe “autopen” Biden was in office, Durbin was opposed to holds that former Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, put on Biden’s U.S. attorney nominees.
But Vance’s holds “were limited to a small number of U.S. Attorney nominees in the latter half of the Biden administration,” according to a May statement from Grassley’s office.
“Our communities desperately need top federal prosecutors in place. Interested in stopping fentanyl? I am. Thousands of people are dying,” Durbin said in a 2023 press release. “Who’s going to prosecute those cases? The U.S. Attorneys — 93 of them across the United States. But you can’t prosecute the case if you don’t have the U.S. Attorney there to lead the effort, coordinate the effort with other branches of government.”
Just a year ago, Durbin was again urgently pressing for no-holds confirmation for the sake of public safety.
“It would not have been fair or realistic to force the Senate to debate and vote on every single one of [Trump’s] nominees. … [Democrats] put public safety and the needs of law enforcement ahead of politics,” Durbin said. “But now, they [Senate Republicans] are putting us on the path to requiring cloture and confirmation votes for every U.S. Attorney nominee. This is entirely unsustainable, which is something everyone here knows. Without Senate-confirmed leadership of U.S. Attorneys, public safety will suffer across the United States. [Republicans] cannot delay these nominations and then stand up and say they are for ‘law and order’ and want to ‘fight crime.’”
Now Durbin and his Democrat friends don’t seem to care about law and order at all.
Grassley has worked behind the scenes for more than two months seeking to strike a deal with Democrats to drop their holds on U.S. attorneys, and the failure to compromise has motivated Senate Republicans to consider addressing the U.S. attorneys logjam as part of the broader rules change that’s currently being discussed, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.