Senate Republicans are staring down a high-stakes week as they try to settle on a plan of attack in their bid to expedite the confirmation of hundreds of President Trump’s lower-level nominees Democrats have been holding up.
Tensions are still simmering almost a month after senators left Washington after failing to break the logjam, and Republicans will return next week on the precipice of changing the chamber’s rules to more easily push the nominees over the finish line.
“The expectation is to move a rule change fairly quick,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) told The Hill in a phone interview, noting conversations in the conference are expected shortly after the Senate reconvenes. “The conference is going to have its input on it. We’ll probably have to massage it some.”
“We all agree that we’ve got to break the logjam that [Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer] has created by him filibustering every single nominee except [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio,” Mullin said. “He went nuclear, and it’s forced us to have to make a rule change. It shouldn’t have to be this way, but he chose to do it this way. [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune said at the beginning of this Congress that we can do it the hard way or do it the easy way, and Schumer has decided to do it the hard way.”
It’s not clear a rule change will have unanimous support from Senate Republicans.
In order to change the rules without Democratic support, Republicans will need to employ the “nuclear option” — so called because it is viewed as highly destructive to bipartisanship.
Still, momentum is building for Republicans.
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) formally threw his weight behind the push to change the rules in an op-ed Tuesday night, saying “dilatory warfare” from the minority party means the chamber has only confirmed 135 of the 1,000-plus posts that require a green light from senators.
“Confirming even the most routine nominees is now a bitter fight. It is time to change Senate confirmation rules,” the No. 2 Senate Republican wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “The blockade’s scale is staggering.”
Barrasso noted the chamber confirmed roughly 90 percent of nominations made by former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama via voice vote or unanimous consent. That number dropped to 65 percent for Trump’s first term and 57 percent for former President Biden.
For Trump’s second term, that number is a goose egg — and it’s the driving force behind changes.
Among the changes being discussed are chopping debate time for a nominee from two hours to 15 minutes, eliminating altogether the vote to limit debate, or allowing nominees who receive bipartisan support in committee to head straight to the floor for a final vote.
“There’s multiple options here,” Mullin said.
Republicans had left for August recess without a deal with top Senate Democrats to advance a package of noncontroversial nominees, further infuriating a GOP conference already upset over Democrats forcing the majority party to use up the full clock to process each of Trump’s picks, no matter the level of bipartisan backing.
Schumer, Thune and the White House were in deep discussions on a nominations package into the final hours before the August recess but came up empty, leading Trump to assail the Democratic leader for wanting too much in return.
Internal conversations have been ongoing for members throughout recent weeks to figure out the way forward. Among those is a working group of a half-dozen members being led by GOP Sens. Katie Britt (Ala.) and James Lankford (Okla.) to “explore the menu of options,” be it an internal quick fix or something more long-term that Democrats could potentially get behind.
“We have the votes to do something,” a source familiar with the discussions said, adding that it is unclear “whether we can do more.”
Trump over the weekend threw another wrench in the mix by demanding the Senate abandon its “blue slip” tradition, which allows senators to block district court judge and U.S. attorney nominees from their home states.
Frustrated with the lack of movement on his nominees, the president went on the attack against Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and vowed to take legal action against the longtime Senate custom.
A rules alteration would mark yet another maneuver by a Senate majority over the past 15 years to grease the skids to confirm their preferred choices without help from the other party. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) kicked off the push in 2012 by lowering the threshold needed to approve executive branch and judicial nominations, other than Supreme Court choices.
Five years later, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made the change for Supreme Court nominees. McConnell also was in charge when Senate Republicans lowered the debate time for lower-level nominees from 30 hours to the current two-hour mark.
“We’re trying to figure this out. The last 20 years, it’s getting worse every session,” Lankford recently told reporters at the Capitol. “It’s intolerable. … Whether you’re a Republican [or] Democrat president, we’ve got to figure out how the president actually gets confirmed nominees.”
Democrats do not appear to have much of an appetite to discuss or jump aboard for a potential change. Schumer said before the August recess that the GOP would be making a “huge mistake,” then spiked the football by touting how his party handled talks with Trump and the GOP on a possible nominations package.
“Donald Trump didn’t get his way,” Schumer declared at the time. “He bullied us. He cajoled us. He called us names. And he went home with nothing.”
Republicans believe they have few options once they return, given that posture.
“When I talk to my Democratic colleagues, they all say the same thing: ‘Yeah, this is really a problem, and this is a mess we gotta be able to fix,’” Lankford said. “I’m like — OK, well, let’s fix it. And the next thing is, ‘Well, we have to oppose Trump on everything.'”
“This is literally destroying the Senate,” he added.
Emily Brooks contributed.