Full speed ahead with Trump’s Senate confirmations
Good idea at this point:
Republicans voted on Thursday to change the rules of the Senate in a rare move that will allow them to expedite the confirmation process for President Donald Trump’s executive branch nominees.
The party-line vote using the so-called “nuclear option” will enable the Senate to confirm some presidential nominees as groups, rather than individually, with only a simple majority vote.
Democrats had refused to perform the usual courtesy of confirming a president’s nominees, for no reason other than Trump Bad and Our Democracy.
Hard to believe that Trump has only been in office since late January, so much has happened since then.
The media loves to talk about nuclear options. Ending the filibuster is the actual rubicon, the line the Republicans don’t want to cross. This is not that.
For years, presidential nominations for the plethora of deputy assistant undersecretaries and members of various boards sailed through, both parties recognizing one principle: The President gets his guys. The winners said, “Yeah, we want this guy, too,” and the losers said, “Yeah, whatever. The President gets his guys.”
Until Trump. Now, the Democrats are trying to run out the clock by using every single procedural rule (not laws, Senate rules, agreed upon by members of both parties and maintained as formalities) to delay, slow walk, obstruct, and hinder the government from being able to work.
Yes, the Republicans are giving up a future weapon. Yes, a future Democrat President will use this. Fine. Let them. But the President gets his guys, and if the Democrats are unwilling to recognize this after decades of going along, to hell with them. Let the majority act as such and end their petty obstruction.
The filibuster is different. That gets us closer to tyranny of the majority, even though our legislature is almost completely impotent at this point.
This is not that.
This was needed.
Schumer whined about how this was going to backfire on the GOP. Well, the GOP has the presidency for the next 11 plus years.
The Dems’ only policy is oppose Trump on everything. That’s meaningless.
Oh No! The Dems will do this too, then. As if they wouldn’t do it if Rep pulled the same caca as the Dems are now. Be not afraid, do your Job.
@Mitchell Strand:Ending the filibuster is the actual rubicon, the line the Republicans don’t want to cross. This is not that.
The filibuster can, is, and has been set aside at any time by simple majority vote, even for one time only, and there are multiple ways to do it.
There is no other way it can be, because the ruling of the Chair on any and all rules can be overturned by simple majority vote.
Its only purpose is to give the majority party cover to not do something it doesn’t really want to do, but put individual Senators on record as being for it or against it without having it actually come to pass. It is an accountability avoidance device.
“Hard to believe that Trump has only been in office since late January”
True…I started a sentence yesterday with the words, “Well 2 years ago when they tried to assassinate Trump…” only to have to stop, correct myself and marvel at what’s transpired over the last 12 months…
SHIREHOME on September 12, 2025 at 3:28 pm said:
Oh No! The Dems will do this too, then. As if they wouldn’t do it if Rep pulled the same caca as the Dems are now. Be not afraid, do your Job.
The Dems never need to do that, since Republicans routinely approve Democrat nominations, even grotesquely unqualified ones, on the theory that the President should be allowed to choose his cabinet. Stupid, since the leftwing obstruction has been happening for decades. But Republicans never miss a chance to to miss a chance.
I’m impressed that they quit jawing about it and actually vote in the change.
I think it would be agreeable to radically reduce the number of appointees requiring Senate confirmation and have confirmation hearings for many held by ad hoc panels picked out of a hat. While we’re at it, in each department we might dramatically reduce the number of office holders in the stratum separating the department secretary and the various bureau chiefs. You have a few undersecretaries to whom the line bureau chiefs report and a few assistant secretaries to whom the chiefs of segments of the departmental secretariat report. Why more than that?
Glenn Reynolds:
September 12, 2025
GO HARD: Senate GOP Invokes ‘Nuclear Option’ to Confirm Batches of Trump Nominees.
You know Dems will do it next time they’re in the majority. Which hopefully will be never. And now is not the time for gestures to bipartisanship.
https://instapundit.com/744206/
Why hearings at all? They don’t have hearings for officer commissions do they?
“ Original appointments in the grades of major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel in the Regular Army, Regular Air Force, Regular Marine Corps, and Space Force, and in the grades of lieutenant commander, commander, and captain in the Regular Navy shall be made by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.”
It’s about time. They shouldn’t have waited this long.
Since the requirement for nominations and confirmations are described in the Constitution, we might have hoped they would take this duty more seriously [on both sides of the aisle].
But they have welshed on that duty by accepting the idea that “the president should have his own people”. Seemingly, they fail to appreciate (as we are seeing more clearly now) that these people can be long term political IED’s that end up delaying or destroying a reasonable legislative program or executive branch corrective action. This is so especially for judicial nominations, but also for selected political appointees who bury themselves in the staff ranks.