REPORT: John Thune To Steamroll Chuck Schumer’s Blockade Of Trump Nominees

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From the Daily Caller: Senate Republicans are on the verge of breaking Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s stranglehold over the confirmation process, ending seven months of unprecedented obstruction that has sought to prevent President Donald Trump from staffing his administration.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is expected to invoke the rarely-used “nuclear option” to reform Senate rules allowing for the simultaneous confirmation of lower-level executive branch nominees as early as Monday, a senior Republican aide told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The historic rules change could grant the more than 100 civilian nominees who have been blocked from their postings due to Democrats’ persistent delay tactics a swift confirmation vote before the Senate is scheduled to go on recess on Sept. 19.

Thune has warned since July that Republicans would move to reform the upper chamber rules to circumvent Democrats’ nomination blockade if Schumer did not agree to speed up the confirmation process. The majority leader has worked to find consensus among his conference over the past several weeks to move forward with changing Senate rules.

Thune organized a working group in August after negotiations with Democrats to clear the backlog of executive branch nominees collapsed. The cohort included Republican Sens. Katie Britt of Alabama, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Ted Budd of North Carolina.

Thune announced changes are coming in an op-ed published on Breitbart Monday morning. He wrote:

For decades, Democrats and Republicans have regularly cooperated to swiftly confirm the many, many individuals selected by each president to serve in their administration.

Regardless of the party in the White House, both sides have long agreed that a president deserves to have his or her administration in place, quickly. That doesn’t mean we don’t disagree. But it does mean when nominees are held up, opposed, or blocked—it’s for a legitimate purpose, not for leverage in partisan games, to score political points at the expense of public safety.

Now, while I agree with the above sentiment, those sentences aren’t actually mine. Those are the words of Democrat Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in 2022, when President Biden already had 405 Senate-confirmed nominees in place, 230 of whom were confirmed via voice vote.

By the time Leader Schumer was complaining about the nominations pace, the Senate had already confirmed numerous batches of nominees via voice vote, as it has always done. In fact, every president has had a majority of his nominees confirmed this way.

Until now.

Democrats have made President Donald Trump the first president on record to not have a single nominee confirmed via voice vote or unanimous consent, and they are forcing time-consuming votes on noncontroversial nominees who go on to be confirmed by large bipartisan margins. It’s Trump Derangement Syndrome on steroids.

It’s delay for delay’s sake, and it’s a pettiness that leaves desks sitting empty in agencies across the federal government and robs our duly elected president of a team to enact the agenda that the American people voted for in November. This historic obstruction also chews up valuable time on the Senate floor that would be better spent working on legislation, like moving appropriations bills on time, reauthorizing programs critical to national defense, and considering and debating some of the more than 120 bipartisan bills reported out of committee that aim to make families and businesses stronger and more prosperous.

Republicans aren’t going to tolerate this obstruction any longer. We have tried to work with Democrats in good faith to batch bipartisan, noncontroversial nominees and clear them expeditiously, according to past precedent. Democrats have stood in the way at every turn.

Over the past month, I organized a group of Republican senators representing various points of view within the party to develop a solution. We have developed a plan, based on a previous proposal from Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Angus King (D-ME), that would allow the Senate to batch nominations together and clear the growing backlog. The Klobuchar-King proposal was designed to speed up the confirmation process at a time when the Senate was regularly confirming batches of nominees by voice vote, a luxury Democrats have not allowed this Congress. We have modified this proposal to account for the added obstruction by allowing nominees to move in larger groups.

When the Senate convenes this week, I will begin the necessary procedural steps to reform the Senate’s rules. No party should be able to weaponize the confirmation process the way that Senate Democrats are doing now, in a way that has never been done before. This total obstruction simply cannot be the standard moving forward – both in principle and in practicality. We must return to the Senate’s traditional confirmation process that existed before this unprecedented blockade.

READ MORE of Thune’s op-ed from Breitbart.

“We need to restore the way nominations have always worked in the Senate, before Senate Democrats and their Trump Derangement Syndrome needlessly delayed and blocked the will of the American people. @POTUS deserves to have his team members in place so that they can enact his agenda,” Thune declared, sharing a video from a press conference.

Speaking to Fox News, Thune said, “This is a blockade unlike anything we’ve seen. It is Trump Derangement Syndrome on steroids. President Trump needs his team in these key positions to implement the agenda the American people voted for in November.”

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) wrote, “Senate Democrats are breaking with long-standing tradition by refusing to confirm noncontroversial civilian nominees by voice vote or unanimous consent. This needless obstruction keeps the Trump administration understaffed and wastes valuable floor time that we should be using to address our America First legislative priorities. Something has got to change.”

READ MORE from the Daily Caller.

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