Senate Likely to Confirm Dozens of Trump Nominees After Going ‘Nuclear’

After months of a Democrat blockade of President Donald Trump’s nominees, Republicans in the Senate have gone nuclear.

By a vote to 53-to-45 on Thursday afternoon, the Senate voted in favor of what is commonly referred to as the “nuclear option,” the creation of a new Senate rule by a simple majority vote, rather than the two-thirds typically required.

The rule that will result from the deployment of the nuclear option will allow the Senate to confirm presidential nominees in batches, rather than one by one. Next week, the Senate will finalize the rule changes that will likely set a new precedent for how the upper chamber goes about confirming presidential appointments. 

Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters ahead of Thursday’s vote that he had “made it clear that one of my priorities was to get the Senate functioning again.”

“The Senate can’t function effectively as a legislative body with the confirmation process in the state that it’s in right now,” Thune said.

Senators spent more than five hours negotiating alternatives to the nuclear option, but those talks ultimately fell apart when the proposed alternatives failed to earn the unanimous consent of the upper chamber. Democrats attempted to punt the negotiations to next week as the chamber started running up against a deadline imposed by senators departing Washington for the weekend.

Typically, the Senate advances presidential nominees through the confirmation process by unanimous consent, but Senate Democrats’ unprecedentedly obstructed Trump’s nominees by refusing to advance them in that manner.

“The story of this Republican majority has been a story of surrender of the Senate’s power over to Donald Trump,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., claimed earlier this week. “That’s especially true with the nominations process. What’s going on right now with nominations is beyond the pale.”

“For two centuries, most presidential nominees have sailed through this chamber by voice vote and by unanimous consent,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., wrote in a post on the social media platform X. “That was the gold standard of advice and consent. Senator Schumer and Senate Democrats abandoned it. Instead of deliberation, Senate Democrats chose unprecedented delay. That ends now.”

In 2013, then in control of the Senate, Democrats first deployed the nuclear option, with respect to lower court judicial nominees and presidential Cabinet picks. When they regained control of the Senate, Republicans did likewise, scrapping the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court justices in 2017 after Trump nominated federal Judge Neil Gorsuch to the highest court in the land.

The Senate is expected to confirm dozens of Trump’s nominees as early as next week.