EXCLUSIVE — Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is assuring his conference that senators won’t lose their power under a rule change that lets the Senate bundle nominees into one large vote.
In an interview, Thune said he has agreed to three or four “protocols” that will govern how leadership moves a batch of nominees across the Senate floor, one of which is to remove names that lack Republican support.
In theory, bundling nominees together could force senators to vote “yes” on the whole package despite reservations over individual nominees, but Thune committed to removing any name with a GOP hold on it and already struck a “couple” from an initial batch that could be approved next week.
“You know, somebody described it as the bad apple example,” Thune told the Washington Examiner. “There’s always going to be a bad apple, and I’m not saying that necessarily, that there are, but there are also times in which you have senators who, for one reason or another, are trying to get the attention of the White House, a particular agency or department of government, and this is one of the ways that in the Senate you’re able to do that. So we don’t want to diminish or minimize our colleagues’ opportunity to do that.”
The guardrail came out of rolling conversations centered on how to change Senate rules to break the Democratic delay on virtually all of President Donald Trump’s nominees. Thune convened a working group to hash through different proposals, from shorter debate time to fewer procedural votes, and settled on batch voting with input from his conference.
It remains to be seen if Republicans will stay united on Thursday, when Thune is expected to go “nuclear” and change Senate rules with just a simple majority vote, rather than the traditional 67 senators needed to undo the chamber’s precedent. If successful, the first tranche of 48 Trump nominees could be confirmed as soon as next Wednesday.
But Thune has spent the lead-up to that floor vote walking his conference through the finer details of the rule change and how leadership would preserve senators’ privileges. In terms of protocol, Thune promised his team would consult with committee chairs on the nomination packages, while his message to rank-and-file Republicans is that the current pace of confirmations is unsustainable.
In past administrations, upward of 90% of nominees have been confirmed by voice vote or unanimous consent, with that figure standing at 65% in Trump’s first term. This year, however, Democrats have demanded a formal series of votes on just about every Trump 2.0 nominee, eating up valuable floor time.
“I think there’s still a lot of dialogue around it, but I think we’ve settled on a place that hopefully most of our members are comfortable with and which gets us back to the way we were doing it prior,” Thune said.
“So, we’ll see how the votes go, but I think we’re trending in the right direction, and honestly, I just don’t think we had a choice,” he added.
If Thune succeeds, Trump could see his nominee backlog nearly vanish in a matter of weeks. Republicans decided to exempt Cabinet-level nominees and judges from their batch voting rule change, but there are still about 150 names eligible for an “en bloc” floor vote.
Some of those nominees must receive another committee vote, including Mike Waltz’s U.N. ambassador nomination, due to a quirk in Senate rules regarding proxy voting, leading Senate Republicans to send dozens of them back this week, but Thune predicted all could be confirmed by early October and said the second batch of nominees could be larger than the first.
“We had to pare that first bloc down a little bit, but the second bloc, I’m hoping, will catch us up,” he said.
Republicans emphasized efficiency in deciding on the rule change, passing over proposals that would have accelerated the process but still monopolized floor time.
Their change is loosely modeled on a Democrat-led proposal that would allow up to 10 nominees from the same committee to be bundled in a single floor vote, but Thune noted that many of the committees only report one or two nominees at a time.
Republicans also considered eliminating a procedural step in the voting process but opted against that solution, given it would still require about 300 votes to clear the current backlog by the end of the year.
“We just figured that was an inordinate amount of time to be spending on personnel,” Thune said. “And so, really, the only way that you salvage the time and free up time to do other things that the Senate needs to do legislatively is starting to move en bloc.”
Democrats initially expressed openness to a rule change, given that batch voting will help them the next time they’re in the majority, but escalating tensions with the White House, including a fight over rescinded funds, have clouded the possibility of bipartisan cooperation.
Thune said Republicans received some last-minute “overtures” from a handful of Democrats open to negotiating over the rules change, but it would take significant cross-aisle support to change the rules without going “nuclear,” and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has dug in against the proposal.
On Tuesday, Schumer unsuccessfully attempted to block debate on the rule change and has accused Republicans of turning the Senate into a “conveyor belt” for Trump’s nominees.
Thune acknowledged that Trump’s frustration with Democrats’ delay tactics contributed to the rule change discussion, but he framed en bloc voting as a middle ground that lets the president have his nominees without resorting to extreme measures such as recess appointments.
Recess appointments did not come up in a two-hour conversation with Trump last week, Thune said, but the president has previously demanded that Congress adjourn so he can name his appointees all at once.
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“I think that punts even more of kind of our institutional power,” Thune said. “I think that retaining the power of confirmation, but also restoring the way that it was done in the past, and has been done, is kind of the objective here.
“So, I think this is a way of fulfilling his desire, and sort of dealing with the frustration he has about the way the Democrats are obstructing and blocking and keeping him from getting his people in place, but doing it in a way, I think, that it still respects the history and traditions of the Senate.”
