Senate GOP Eyes Rule Change to Speed Up Confirmations of Trump Nominees
“[W]e’re going to have to take steps to get this process back on a reasonable footing. … And one way or the other, it’s going to have to get fixed.”
Days before the August recess, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) joined Brian Kilmeade on Fox Radio to discuss the Democrats’ “unprecedented” obstruction of President Donald Trump’s civilian nominees. Thune said:
This is the first president in history who has never had, at this point in his presidency, a civilian nominee approved either by unanimous consent or voice vote in the Senate, which is a way of expediting nominees that you know are broadly supported. So, they [Democrats] are delaying, obstructing, blocking, at every point in the process.
There was a time when the majority of Senate confirmations were made by unanimous consent.
During a floor speech last week, Thune voiced frustration with his Democratic colleagues’ obstruction of the confirmation process and urged greater cooperation.
He noted that 98% of civilian nominees were confirmed by unanimous consent or voice vote during the first terms of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. That share declined to 90% under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, fell further to 65% during President Trump’s first term, and dropped again to 57% under President Biden. However, Thune said, so far, in the first eight months of Trump’s second term, not a single nominee has been confirmed by unanimous consent or voice vote.
“By this point in his administration, President Biden had had 76 [nominees confirmed],” he said. “Trump’s nominees have faced a historic level of obstruction.”
He cited data on how smoothly the confirmation process had worked out in previous administrations compared to the current one.
He called for “an end to the ridiculous – and I mean ridiculous – delays on every nomination, including on nominations that Democrats ended up supporting in significant numbers.”
Democrats, he said, were holding up nominations “because they don’t like President Trump.”
And Democrats’ obstruction is not only preventing voters from getting the administration they elected, it’s also slowing down the essential business of the United States Senate.
Over August, Mr. President, my colleagues and I discussed various ways of addressing this problem and expediting confirmations.
And there are a lot of options on the table – none of which, I might add, would be necessary if the Senate Democrats treated this president [how] Republican and Democrat Senates have treated … Republican and Democrat presidents for all of American history.
Democrats must show “a willingness to acknowledge President Trump won an election, the American people voted for him, and they expect him to be able to populate his administration with the people that he wants to serve in many of these positions.”
Thune warned:
If Democrats continue to obstruct, if they continue to drag out confirmation of every single one of the nominations of a duly elected president, if they continue to slow the Senate’s business to such a drastic degree, then we’re going to have to take steps to get this process back on a reasonable footing.
And one way or the other, it’s going to have to get fixed.
As of today, @POTUS has not had a single one of his civilian nominees confirmed by unanimous consent or voice vote.
If Democrats continue to drag out the confirmation of every single one of the nominations of a duly elected president, then we are going to have to take steps to… pic.twitter.com/ygJOgxhx60
— Leader John Thune (@LeaderJohnThune) September 2, 2025
Republicans have several options. They are hoping to avoid the most drastic option, the “nuclear option,” which would involve changing the rule by a simple majority vote. This would allow them to bypass Democrats. It also might come back to haunt them in the future when they are in the minority.
They could accept an offer from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to Thune made through intermediaries on the eve of the August recess, one that sounded a lot like extortion.
According to a source who spoke to Politico on the condition of anonymity:
[Democrats] would trade a small tranche of nominations now for the administration unfreezing certain funding. Democrats are then offering to do another tranche later this year, but the deal would be off if the administration transmits another request to the Senate to claw back more spending.
Wisely, Thune rejected that proposal.
The most likely course for the GOP will be the use of “en bloc” voting. Thune told Fox that before Schumer’s leadership, “This was always done in a way where, if you had some of the lower-level nominees in the administration, those were all voted ‘en bloc,’ they were packaged, they were grouped, they were stacked.”
During an interview with Fox News on Saturday, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) said that next week, Senate Republicans plan to “move forward with a proposal to move ‘en bloc’ nominees who have either in the past been [confirmed] by unanimous consent — meaning no objection — or bipartisan support. That will allow us to clear our backlog.”
Republicans are going to confirm President Trump's nominees. Period.
Democrats have decided to go nuclear. They're desperate. We've never seen anything like this level of obstruction.
Doesn't matter. The GOP is united—and we're going to move these nominations through. pic.twitter.com/WPxjMZbZgb
— Senator Eric Schmitt (@SenEricSchmitt) September 6, 2025
During an interview with Thune last week, Fox News’ Dana Perino noted, “President Trump is basically being asked to run a marathon with 20-pound weights on his ankles because he can’t get his team confirmed.”
She asked Thune how “what the Democrats were doing” was different than what Republicans had done to them in the past.
He replied:
Dana, this is different from anything that’s been done in history. … It is unprecedented. It is historic. It is a blockade unlike anything we’ve seen. It is Trump Derangement Syndrome totally on steroids and it’s got to be fixed. We can’t sustain this. The president needs his team in place. The American people voted for that. They want him to be able to implement his agenda. He needs his people in these key positions in order to do that.
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. pic.twitter.com/br0HJ2NEYj
— Leader John Thune (@LeaderJohnThune) September 4, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Once upon a time we had a Loyal Opposition…
Now they’ve become 5th column communists
Aside from the outright anti-American bent, the wasted opportunity of Democratic obstruction is untold. It has harmed regular people and created undue division. When you can’t get even one person approved, it tells a convincing story.
NOBODY is buying this act, Thune.
You literally just took over a month off while declaring the Senate ‘in session’ to screw Trump out of recess appointments, now you want to pretend that maybe at some unspecified future point you might change the rules to get a few through faster?
Nobody is buying this act.
Recess appointments are not an option any more. The last time they came before SCOTUS, when it threw out 0bama’s appointments that had been made in the three days between one meeting and the next, the majority (4 liberals plus Kennedy) said a long-enough recess would count, but didn’t say how long that was except that it couldn’t be any less than ten days.
But the conservative minority said that 1) all intrasession recess appointments are invalid, no matter how long the senate has been on break; 2) even if you were to call an intersession recess (which doesn’t exist nowadays), the president could only fill vacancies that occurred during the recess.
If the senate were to recess for 10 days, or even 30, and Trump were to make any appointments, you can absolutely guarantee that the Dems would run straight to SCOTUS. Presumably Roberts, Thomas, and Alito haven’t changed their minds. I think you can guarantee Gorsuch would join them. So if at least one of Barrett and Kavanaugh join them, that would be the end of recess appointments forever. Even if they both voted to uphold the appointments, I think Jackson would join the conservatives because Trump.
It’s telling that people here downvote FACTS, ones they have no argument to make against, simply because they don’t like the fact that the universe doesn’t reorder itself to suit their fantasies.
The only thing I can take from this (and many other) political situations today is that, we, as a nation, are incapable of self governing.
More empty words from the GOPe “leader”.
As a first step end the ‘blue slip’ tradition for Judicial nominees. Second work with HoR for a pain in the ass CR that will set a spending cap at 97% of current spending if no budget is passed on time and runs for 90 days. Then it is automatically renewed for 90 days unless a full budget has been passed but spending drops another 3%. Repeated each quarter until a full budget is passed.
Then tell the Senate d/prog to have at it on the delays and keep the Senate in session with quorum calls occurring as directed by GoP Majority at anytime (the trusted GoP Senators will know but d/prog and rinos won’t) 24/7/365 to advance the nominees. A little sleep deprivation for the d/prog will likely assist the end of obstructionist tactics.
which gop will defect again and help the dnc agenda!!
This is “resistance” for the sake of “resistance,” nothing more.
It’s what three-year-olds do.
How would you characterized the nomination of Merrick Garland to be Associate Justice? His nomination never even went to committee, let alone a floor vote.
Was that “resistance” for the sake of “resistance”. as three year olds would do?
No, it was for the purpose of holding the seat open, so a Republican elected later that year would be able to fill it the next year.
As McConnell said at the time, there had never been a case where a senate controlled by the president’s opposition had allowed him to fill a SCOTUS seat in a presidential election year. Had it still been 2015, they would probably have considered the nomination, since holding the seat open for more than a year would seem unreasonable. But a year is reasonable.
Of course the big difference is that it was the senate majority that chose not to consider the nomination. The majority has the undisputed right to control the body’s agenda, and it is not required to consider matters that it doesn’t want to. Here we have a senate minority hijacking the senate with procedural obstacles which are there to promote proper debate, not to be used for sheer sabotage.
The majority wants to debate and vote on the nominations, and the minority is filibustering, i.e. acting like pirates. Not for a reason, but simply to be obstructive. There’s a limit on how long the majority can be expected to put up with such nonsense.
Really, that’s the example you pick? Total Shitshow Garland?
Do better.
Did you also forget that Garland was nominated by President Obama to GoP majority Senate…. the same President Obama who famously declared that ‘elections have consequences’? Perhaps you and rest of the lefty wokiestas believed that consequences weren’t gonna be a two way street b/c y’all swallowed the ‘arc of history’ rhetorical nonsense.
Thune and the rinos will never go to war with demonrats. You want the Trump coalition to show up in mass in 2026. Lay waste to the demonrat senate obstruction. Lay out why you’re doing it in the same way President Trump does. Do it and tell the media to GFY. Just ignore “blue slip” bs and approve the Judges.
Time’s a-wasting. Let’s get this done.