Senate Republicans rammed through dozens of President Donald Trump’s nominees on Thursday in their first flex of the Senate’s new rules for confirmations.
Lawmakers voted along party lines to confirm 48 of Trump’s nominees, many being for undersecretary or assistant secretary positions in a variety of agencies throughout the federal government and ambassadorships.
Senate Republicans went ‘nuclear’ last week to make the change after a last-minute deal with Democrats fell apart.
The change ushered in by the ‘nuclear option’ allows lawmakers to confirm an unlimited number of nominees in batches, also known as en bloc, with a simple majority vote in the upper chamber. However, the process is time-consuming, given that lawmakers must jump through procedural hoops and allow for 30 hours of debate.
‘Why has not a single nominee been confirmed by voice vote or by unanimous consent? We know why,’ Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said on the Senate floor. ‘It’s Democrat obstruction.
‘The country has never seen anything like this,’ he continued. ‘Senate Democrats are freezing the Senate floor, freezing the federal government and freezing our nation’s progress. This harms America’s safety. It hamstrings the agenda that Americans voted for.’
Among this batch of nominees were Kimberly Guilfoyle, who Trump tapped to be the U.S. ambassador to Greece, and Callista Gingrich, who was picked to be the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland.
Republicans argued that the change would benefit both parties now and in the future and viewed the change as an option of last resort to break through Senate Democrats’ blockade of Trump’s picks.
Typically, subcabinet-level nominees, particularly those with bipartisan support out of committee, are sped through the Senate either by unanimous consent or through a voice vote, two fast-track procedural moves in the upper chamber. All the nominees in this first round made it out of committee on a bipartisan basis.
However, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his caucus wouldn’t allow either to be used and caused a backlog of nominees to lower level positions in the Trump administration to pile up. As of Thursday, the list had swollen to 173.
The only one of Trump’s nominees that easily moved through the chamber was Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was confirmed in January on a near unanimous vote.