When the Senate returns in September, Republicans are saying one of the first things they’ll consider is a change to chamber rules that would allow for speedier confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominees.
But considering those changes — and actually enacting them — could be two very different things.
“We have 144 nominations left to do and 160 still going through committee,” Sen. Bernie Moreno said in the Capitol last week. “That’s a huge number. The way the Democrats are forcing us to do it with historic obstruction doesn’t make any sense. So I think there’s a huge appetite for us to change the rules.”
There’s long been discussion among both parties about changing Senate rules to allow for speedier confirmations for presidential nominees. The current process can take anywhere from days to months.
But the discussions reached a tipping point for Republicans in July when their plans to leave town for August recess were threatened by a standoff with Senate Democrats over Trump’s backlog of unconfirmed picks.
Republicans — seething over the frequency with which Democrats have filibustered historically bipartisan positions — tried to broker a deal with their minority counterparts that would speed up confirmation for a batch of nominees. Those negotiations went on for days, with Trump himself demanding that senators stay in town to get his people through.
Eventually, however, the negotiations went sideways, and conversations about leaving town, coming back after August recess and simply changing the rules took over instead.
Now, with just over two weeks left before senators return to work, Senate Republicans are actively considering what those rule changes might look like. Amending the Senate rules would require a two-thirds vote for cloture and 51 votes for passage. Republicans have 53 seats, with a handful of moderates who have been willing to vote down the president’s priorities this term.
That means that any rule change would almost certainly require Republicans to “go nuclear,” meaning the chair makes a new ruling, the minority challenges it, and Republicans simply vote them down on a simple majority vote.
At the moment, Republicans don’t seem to be sure what they’re going to do.
“There have been some discussions about rule changes in terms of the time and the time delay between cloture and an actual vote,” Sen. Mike Rounds said at a pro forma session last week. “I think the possibility of eliminating a cloture is one item on it.”
He added that additional proposals under consideration include changing the amount of time someone has to be nominated before the Senate can vote to confirm and potentially allowing more than one nominee to be voted on at a time.
“Those are some of the rules that I think they’re talking about,” Rounds said. “Some of those I would be comfortable with making modifications to, but I’d rather start seeing if we can come up with a bipartisan approach to this. The founding fathers wanted us to do these things in a consensus basis. I hate to give that up.”
A bipartisan approach seems like a long shot.
For one, Senate Republicans should have enough votes to make changes on their own, should they get past cloture, meaning there’s theoretically little need for them to court Democratic votes.
For another, even though Senate Democrats have had their own past complaints about how painfully slow confirming some nominees can be, they are hardly interested in changing rules to expedite confirmations for Trump now.
Before the August break, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the floor that “we have never seen nominees as flawed, as compromised, as unqualified, as we have right now.” He added that “historically bad nominees deserve a historic level of scrutiny.”
Around that same time, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin told reporters that Democrats have been following the rules with Trump’s nominees. He didn’t appear eager to allow that process to change.
“I know they would like to return to those golden years when there were groups of nominees considered,” Durbin said. “But we weren’t given that courtesy by them when they were in the same position we are, so we’re kind of stuck where we are.”
And then there’s the question of whether enough Republicans would actually be willing to get on board, either.
The Senate is known for its ironclad love of tradition and precedent. Changing chamber rules isn’t something everyone’s bound to do lightly. After all, Republicans could have allowed Trump’s appointments to be confirmed via recess appointments this month, as the president has demanded repeatedly.
Instead, the chamber is holding pro forma sessions meant to prevent recess appointments.
Still, Republicans are hopeful, if not adamant, that there’s room for some degree of bipartisan collaboration.
“I think there’s going to be real changes,” Rounds said. “And whether they come by a hard majority-only vote, or whether we can find some kind of consensus, is yet to be determined.”