Anti-Trump Democrats’ Best Allies: Senate Republicans

So far, the Senate has confirmed 14 of the 549 senior federal positions that President Trump needs to run the government and who need Senate confirmation—Cabinet secretaries and people who run the departments, bureaus, agencies and the rest of the government. The rest of the government is being run by career bureaucrats and a few Obama holdovers.

There are another 120 vacant federal judgeships and, of course, the Neil Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court. Each requires Senate approval.

White House staff is busily choosing and vetting candidates for the rest of the positions, and there undoubtedly will be many nominations sent to the Senate for confirmation in the next several weeks.

And where is the Senate now? On vacation.

We hear a lot of talk that Harry Reid gave away the store when he exercised the nuclear option, and that Republicans have the 51 votes needed to get the Trump team confirmed. That may be, but with the way Majority Leader Mitch McConnell runs the Senate, Democrats can—and probably will—make it impossible to confirm more than a handful of nominees.

The problem isn’t the votes. Republicans have those. The problem is time—floor time.

As a senior Senate staffer told me this week: “Regardless of how many votes it takes to confirm or approve anything in the Senate, if Democrats want to force the issue, they can require a minimum of 30 hours to debate any nomination or any bill. Let that sink in. 549 vacancies, at 30 hours each, equals 686 days. If you subtract weekends, and add a nice vacation every few months, you are looking at never finishing this job throughout the entirety of Donald Trump’s first term. And this assumes they are in session around the clock and do no other legislative business, which is also impossible.”

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