The campaign to expedite the confirmation process for President Donald Trump’s nominees by changing Senate rules gained momentum Tuesday after Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso endorsed the move.
Barrasso, the second-ranking Senate Republican, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, called for reforming the upper chamber’s rules to break Senate Democrats’ unprecedented logjam holding up the confirmation process for nearly all the president’s nominees. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has taken a victory lap in August for using an array of procedural roadblocks to drag out the confirmation process for Trump’s picks as long as possible.
“President Trump has more than 1,000 senior-level appointments that require Senate confirmation. Under a radical Democratic resistance strategy, the Senate has so far confirmed only 135,” Barrasso wrote. “Confirming even the most routine nominees is now a bitter fight.”
“It is time to change Senate confirmation rules,” Barrasso added.
Barrasso has excoriated Schumer for forcing Senate GOP leadership to burn through hours of floor time to process nominees who would have been confirmed swiftly via unanimous consent or voice vote under previous presidents.
“Democrats have forced multiple roll-call votes on more than 40 nominees for posts never subject to a single one,” Barrasso wrote. “These confirmations used to take seconds. Now, each can take days.”
Schumer, however, has been unapologetic for dragging out the confirmation process by requiring multiple roll call votes to approve each nominee individually.
The lead Democrat publicly bragged about his caucus’ obstruction after a deal with the president to expedite the confirmation process for certain nominees collapsed. Trump objected to Schumer’s demand to unfreeze funding for certain agencies in exchange for providing consent.
“Damn straight we’re blocking these nominees,” Schumer told “The Parnas Perspective” podcast on Aug. 14. “We can use every tool in the toolbox to delay them, and we have.”
“Historically bad nominees need a historic response,” Schumer said. “And so we did. We blocked them all, and they were frustrated. Trump howled.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has also expressed openness to reforming Senate rules to speed up the confirmation of the president’s nominees.
“If you’re sitting here in August and you’ve only got 10 or 11 percent of the people that you’ve nominated for these positions actually confirmed, something is broken,” Thune told ABC affiliate KOTA-TV on Thursday.
Though Barrasso does not detail specific rule changes that he would support, GOP senators floated a variety of potential reforms before leaving Washington for the August state work period.
“One change would be to eliminate cloture motion on nominees and eliminate a motion to proceed and just have one vote and leave committee and have one vote,” Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told the DCNF in July.
“And I think, really, the caucus is inclined to do something like that,” Paul added. “The push is going to come to shove if there is no negotiation and no settlement before that — I believe that the rules will change.”
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