Senate GOP Goes Nuclear To Confirm More Incompetent Trump Appointees Faster
Boom!
While everyone was preoccupied with the murder — looking pretty indisputable now that it was by a more rightwing “Groyper” — of rightwing shit-stirrer Charlie Kirk, Republicans in the US Senate voted yesterday to help Donald Trump further solidify his absolute control over the US government by making it far easier to rush his appointees into permanent jobs. Up until now, presidential appointees needing Senate approval had to be voted on one-by-one. Under the new rules passed yesterday, the Senate can now approve, by a simple majority, groups of appointees to sub-Cabinet level jobs and ambassadorships. Those groups can include however many appointees the majority leader wants to throw together.
This was one of those “nuclear option” dealies, where the Senate votes to nibble away at the filibuster rules that require a 60-vote majority to get various stuff done. In the past, packages of multiple low-level nominees have received either unanimous consent or at least enough minority votes to be approved, just to move things along. But now, group confirmations can be pushed through on a party-line simple majority no matter how wormy the basket may be.
The new streamlined confirmation rules won’t apply to Cabinet appointees or to judicial nominations, at least not for now. But it will wipe out one of the few tools available to Democrats to protest Trump’s agenda. Democrats have actually been copying a tactic used by Mitch McConnell against Barack Obama’s nominees, forcing debate and the full confirmation process for every lower-level nominee instead of allowing votes by unanimous consent. That was a real bummer for all the assorted friends of campaign donors, folks tenuously connected to the Trump family, and Fox News hosts that have been getting administration jobs.
In a further step to shut the minority party out of any power to check Mad King Donald, the new rules will allow Republican senators to object to an individual nominee in a group confirmation block, but not Democrats. The move will help Republicans clear a backlog of almost 150 nominees waiting for their turn in the confirmation barrel, a slowdown that Trump has been personally pissy about. And you know how angry he gets when his colon the confirmation process gets plugged up.
Yes, this is a process story, please don’t run away, we will try to say enough lewd stuff to make it worth your while. Ahem, spanking. Majority Leader John Thune has been bellyaching about the procedural slowdown in confirmations for weeks, calling their obstruction of Trump nominees an “untenable situation” and pretending it was historically unprecedented, as if parliamentary maneuvers to bog down a majority party had never existed in Congress before.
Thune whined in a floor speech yesterday before the vote, “Democrats and their political base cannot deal with the fact that the American people elected President Trump. […] And so they’re dragging out every confirmation in retaliation.”
Thune may want to ask his predecessor as majority leader about how deeply Mitch McConnell respected the will of the far larger majority of voters who chose Barack Obama in 2008. Blowjob.
Still, Democrats at least tried to avoid the nuclear option last month, offering to allow faster votes on nominees if Trump would agree to release some of the funding the administration has (illegally) held back. But you know what mean obstructionists Democrats are:
Trump torpedoed the deal, encouraging Republicans to go home for their summer break and telling Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) on social media to “GO TO HELL!”
Darn them for their unreasonable demands. Oh yes, also, butt stuff.
Democrats have also said they wanted the ability to have at least some influence over which Trump sycophants and incompetent boobs actually work for the government, but that would obviously spoil the whole point of his being an authoritarian dictator. No, that wasn’t a naughty reference either.
So Thune went ahead and dropped the Big One, or at least a tidy tactical nuclear option that will allow Senate Rs to rubber-stamp (PVC knickers!) whatever crowd of crazies Trump wants. As NBC News explains, it was really quite easy: Thune
initiated the process by bringing up a package of 48 Trump nominees, which under longstanding rules has been subject to the 60-vote threshold. The vote to advance them failed due to Democratic opposition. Then, Thune sought to reconsider and Republicans subsequently voted to overrule the chair, setting a precedent and establishing the new rule.
Enema play.
That cleared the way for those 48 nominees to be confirmed all at one go, with the still minimal two hours of debate time applying to all of them at once, rather than each nominee needing to be debated for that time. The Dipshit Starter Set includes an appointment for former Don Jr. fianceé Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece, and to put Newt Gingrich in another time zone at least some of the time, another ambassadorship for his wife Callista, this time to Switzerland. Hot nurse fantasy.
This is just the latest in a series of actions taken to weaken the filibuster by both parties, at least when it comes to nominations. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) started the ball rolling in 2013 to get Obama nominees, including federal judges, confirmed with a simple majority vote, but left the 60-vote threshold in place for Supreme Court nominees. Republicans nuked that in 2017 so they could approve Neil Gorsuch and the other two Supreme embarrassments, and went on to reduce debate times for all nominees, too.
For all the good it may have done, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) warned that by abdicating their advise and consent power yet again to Trump, Republicans were enabling “a conveyor belt for unqualified Trump nominees.”
Schumer predicted that things are likely to only get worse under the new rule, saying
“This move by Republicans was not so much about ending obstruction, as they claim; rather, it was another act of genuflection to the executive branch ... to give Donald Trump more power and to rubber-stamp whomever he wants whenever he wants them, no questions asked.”
And then all the Republicans looked at him like blank-eyed automatons from Stepford Industries, and nodded slowly in unison.
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Theme song for this post: Randy Newman, "Political Science" (1972)
https://youtu.be/R5mAuPg1ZZw
The fascist takeover wasn't going fast enough for them.