Senate Republicans this week scrapped a proposal to diminish the Democrats’ power to slow down President Trump’s political appointments, after two days of debating the matter.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did change Senate precedent on Thursday to allow Supreme Court picks to be advanced in a simple majority vote. As Republicans planned that move, they also considered another change, one that would shorten the amount of time that Democrats could require the Senate to debate a nominee before the final confirmation vote.
Under the current process, the minority can demand up to 30 hours of additional debate on nominees even after the official vote to end the debate. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., wanted to cut that time to eight hours, in the interest of speeding up confirmations.
“That didn’t go over real well,” a GOP senator, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal Republican strategy sessions, told the Washington Examiner.
Lankford argued that the change would be a modest one, as senators had agreed to similar procedures on a temporary basis in recent years.
“That gives time to still do post-cloture debate, but the real debate has already ended because you’ve already had the initial votes,” Lankford, who first contemplated the idea as part of a working group on Senate rules last year, told the Washington Examiner. “The founders didn’t want us to be efficient, they wanted us to be slow and deliberative. But this is after the deliberation is pretty finished. You should be able to bring it to a close when the outcome is certain.”
The change would have required near unanimity among the 52 Senate Republicans, however. And that provoked “a revolt” from several senators at a Wednesday lunch meeting, according to Republican sources. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was perceived by some of his colleagues as supporting Lankford’s idea, but it was doomed by a coalition of several senators who might not normally work together, ranging from Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee of Utah to relative moderates such as Susan Collins of Maine and Ohio’s Rob Portman, according to another Republican source familiar with the debate.
“It was more than the traffic would bear,” the senator said. “We’re already breaking the rules for Gorsuch, and then we’re going to break more rules right away?”
That’s a setback of sorts for Trump, whose nominees would have been the immediate beneficiaries of the expedited confirmation process. The Senate Republicans’ forbearance on this issue might limit the ease with which the nuclear option is used in the future, however.
“If you can change the rules with a majority vote, how many rules do you change with a majority vote,” ask Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D.
