Top Senate Republicans are vowing to stay in session until all of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees are confirmed — a pledge that could keep senators in Washington for weeks due to Democratic delay tactics.
“We’re not intending to go on recess,” said Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 2 Senate Republican. “We want to get the entire Cabinet confirmed before we talk at all about going into a recess.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in a Tuesday night tweet that “Senate Republicans are ready to work as long as needed to confirm President Trump’s nominees. Nights. Weekends. Recesses.”
The GOP’s vow to grind through Trump’s cabinet picks in the face of Democratic slow-walking comes after the president floated the idea of using recess appointments as a fall-back option during a Tuesday meeting with Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson, reviving an idea that has caused some heartburn with some Senate Republicans.
By keeping the Senate in session, GOP leaders would in effect block Trump from making recess appointments, which are temporary and expire at the end of each yearly congressional session.
“Our goal is to get them confirmed here on the floor of the United States Senate,” Barrasso said when asked about the controversial procedural move.
In 2017, Trump’s final Cabinet nominee wasn’t confirmed until late April. The Senate’s first recess is currently scheduled for mid-March.
Trump’s revival of potential recess appointments comes as the Senate is currently slogging through three of his first nominees: John Ratcliffe to be CIA director, Pete Hegseth to be Defense secretary and Kristi Noem to be DHS secretary. Though Democrats can’t sink any nominee on their own, they do have the ability to eat up days of floor time.
Thune has been careful to not completely close the door on Trump’s recess appointment push — calling it an option on the table — but he also hasn’t embraced it. Trump’s push could return if Democrats blockade his lower-level and judicial nominees.
Asked about recess appointments after Tuesday’s meeting, Thune acknowledged that Trump has been interested in it, but he said that his goal is to get back to the “Obama standard,” aka meeting the pace of confirmations under then-President Barack Obama.
Obama, incidentally, was the last president to use recess appointments. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2014 that three of Obama’s recess appointments were unconstitutional because the Senate had held no-business “pro forma” sessions to avoid triggering a recess. That effectively ended the practice.
