The first American-born pope, Leo XIV, celebrated his inaugural Mass on Sunday in St. Peter’s Square before a large crowd that included Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, two prominent Catholics in the Trump administration. Missing, however, was our country’s official envoy. When the new pope met with the Vatican’s diplomatic corps on Friday, America’s ambassador wasn’t there. We don’t have one right now.
Brian Burch has been nominated by President Trump to be the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, but his is one of nearly 80 nominations now languishing on the Senate’s Executive Calendar. Last week, Senate Republicans tried to fast-track Burch’s nomination in time for Pope Leo’s inauguration. Democrats objected. So Republicans, despite having the power to overcome that objection simply by scheduling the vote on a Friday, shrugged and skipped town.
This is becoming a habit. After confirming Trump’s Cabinet in record time, the Republican-led Senate has returned to its traditional two-and-a-half-day work week and lackadaisical work ethic.
The Trump administration is waiting on all manner of assistant secretaries, under secretaries, deputy secretaries, general counsels, and financial officers. As of this writing, the comptroller of the currency and assistant secretary of the Treasury are both awaiting confirmation, as is the director of the Office of Personnel Management, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the deputy secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, and the general counsels for the Departments of Defense, Agriculture, and Housing and Urban Development — among more than 50 others. The nominee to be the deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency has been sitting on the calendar since mid-March.
Cabinet secretaries are certainly important and often famous. But everyone in Washington knows agencies’ sub-Cabinet-level officers and below are just as critical to executing the president’s agenda.
The entire country watched the permanent bureaucracy subvert President Trump’s first term. And most Republican voters now understand how critical these appointees are — everyone, it seems, except the people whose job it is to confirm them.
There Is No Filibuster for Nominations
Senate Republicans blame “Democratic obstruction” for the glacial pace of confirmations this spring. But that only takes them so far. Yes, Democrats can object to Republican attempts to expedite nominations. But the minority can no longer block them.
As a result of bipartisan actions taken in 2013, 2017, and again in 2019, today the Senate filibuster no longer exists for presidential nominations. And for the vast majority of nominations, neither do the once-compulsory 30 hours of post-cloture debate time.
In other words, presidential nominations today are confirmed with a simple majority, and most only require two hours of debate — and even then, only if a senator is willing to use that time. When the minority lost the power to block nominations, the majority lost the ability to credibly blame them for a slow pace of confirmations. In today’s Senate, Democrats can slow the process down, but they no longer have the unilateral power to block any nomination.
Putting in the Time
Under the new rules, confirming the backlog of nominations simply requires prioritization and work. Senate rules still allow the minority to stall, but for much, much less time than they used to.
The Senate could easily clear every nomination now on the Executive Calendar if they voted on nothing but nominations while working 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., for a full five-day workweek (right now, a normal workweek in the Senate runs from Monday at 5:30 p.m. to Thursday at noon).
If they were willing to work just one weekend a month, they could clear the entire backlog in one or two weekends. Things would move even faster if the GOP senators committed themselves to being on the Senate floor to force Democrats to either use or forfeit their debate time.
The process would look something like this. On a Wednesday, Majority Leader John Thune would need to file a cloture petition (a motion to override Democrats’ objections and end debate) on every nomination on the calendar.
Under Senate cloture rules, cloture petitions filed on Wednesdays can be voted on starting Friday morning. Cloture votes now only require a simple majority, not the 60 votes of days past.
No more than two hours after cloture is invoked, the Senate would then vote to confirm the nominee, also by simple majority. As soon as that vote was gaveled closed, the next cloture vote would be called. And two hours after that, the second nominee would be confirmed, and so on.
Importantly, those two hours of debate allowed after cloture is invoked are a ceiling. And under the Senate’s rules, each senator can only use one hour of it. Normally, the Senate allows the two hours to run even if no one is using them. But that’s a courtesy, not a rule. If 51 Republicans are present on the floor to provide a quorum (the constitutional number required for the Senate to transact business) and no senator asks to speak, the vote can be called immediately.
Democrat senators could seek to use all two hours of debate time on every nomination. But everything we know about the Senate says they will quickly run out of steam. Democrat senators hate working nights and weekends as much as their Republican counterparts. As the hours tick by, they would become increasingly open to a negotiated agreement to speed up the process even further.
Trent Lott, a former Senate majority leader, famously quipped that there are really only two rules in the Senate: exhaustion and unanimous consent.
“And the second,” he said, “only applies when the first has been reached.”
The objection to this strategy is that it requires work — more hours, more workdays, and the physical presence of GOP senators in the Senate chamber (the place, ironically, senators most hate to be). Insiders reject rigorous floor action as “impractical,” not because it won’t work but because senators can’t be bothered.
But there is no more important place for senators to be than the Senate floor, doing the work they were elected to do so President Trump can do the same.
Rachel Bovard is the vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute. She served on Capitol Hill for over a decade, including as legislative director to Sen. Rand Paul and the executive director of the Senate Steering Committee.
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