Without a doubt this is one of the toughest Congresses in recent memory to navigate. There’s a House majority bordering on the nonexistent, a very-online faction of the Senate feeling its oats, and a president who’s understandably more focused on wielding executive power than crafting legislation. Navigating the 119th Congress is a truly daunting task, but Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.), in particular, has excelled at it.
Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R., La.) job has been very commendable, as well. Johnson intuited immediately that the leader of the party in the White House was the most effective “persuader” in a body where everyone is up for re-election. He has been able to use that relationship to pull a string of rabbits out of his hat because, quite simply, House members can cross leadership for fun and profit — but they cross President Donald Trump at their peril.
The Senate is, by design, a different beast entirely. Trent Lott famously described the role of Republican Leader as putting frogs in a wheelbarrow. With six-year terms, the bill for crossing the president may come due eventually, but for most members that day is years into the future. Which is why the role of the Republican Leader has always involved a combination of patience and persuasion.
These are traits in Thune luckily possesses in spades. They have surely been tested to their breaking point both by Democrats and by the activist class, but he has easily met the challenge.
Democratic obstruction is par for the course in a Republican Senate — but each Congress it seems to get worse. The near-universal filibustering of presidential appointees took a long-escalating tit-for-tat on nominations to whole new levels, and threatened the very functioning of the new Trump administration.
Thune, through a combination of patience and persuasion, both marched through a record number of confirmations while also putting a stop to the sorry spectacle once and for all by convincing his members to adopt en bloc confirmations. To do so he built on a body of precedent in the Senate going back a almost a century that the filibuster simply wasn’t designed for nominations.
He persuaded his institutionalist members that there was a straight line from Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Larry Tribe’s actions against Miguel Estrada to the need for en bloc confirmations. All other things being equal, the president deserves his picks, and Thune delivered them.
The obstruction in the appropriations presented a still more significant challenge, but Thune refused to be boxed in by Schumer and has met it. The appropriations process — to the eternal frustration of budget hawks — is a bipartisan process because of the filibuster. There are pros and cons to this, to be sure, but the result is a general baseline of stable funding policy that leaves the government funded with mixed feelings all around.
Unfortunately Democrats have gone out of their way to break this process. Taking a page from the old Tea Party playbook they have used government shutdowns to demand policy concessions on illegal immigration that they know the Republicans will never make.
Because the press is captured by the left, they get away with it in ways Republicans simply can’t. But ICE needs to be funded, and Democrats — through their actions under President Joe Biden — gave Thune a path for doing so: budget reconciliation.
If Democrats won’t agree to fund the agencies, then Republicans will use the available tools to do it alone. It’s not a perfect solution — it would be better for the agencies if it were appropriated funds, and a future of bifurcated controversial/non-controversial appropriations process is very possible and unwelcome. But Thune’s job was to find a solution in order to keep our country safe from illegal immigration, and he did.
Thune has also faced almost six months of unrelenting pressure from online activists and a few of his colleagues to abolish the filibuster in favor of passing the latest iteration of the SAVE America Act. Eventually the president joined the chorus, as well.
Whatever the merits of the legislation, Thune looked around his conference and immediately concluded there was no appetite to turn the Senate into a majoritarian institution. When the armchair parliamentarians sprouted like cicadas to make their periodic argument that it doesn’t really take 60 votes to pass a bill, Thune, again, looked around and didn’t see his colleagues buying that particular bag of magic beans.
Thune didn’t bring down the hammer, though, and cut off debate among his members. Instead he welcomed debate — for months! — on the procedural questions at play.
Patience.
Eventually Thune agreed to call up the bill using all the procedural shortcuts available to him to see — and show — what happens when you try an open-ended “talking filibuster.” It fizzled. Even the most conservative members were more interested in reenacting Mr. Smith Goes Back Home for the Weekend, demonstrating that there simply is not “one weird trick” to establish a 50-vote threshold.
Persuasion.
Thune’s critics maintain that he failed in not bringing down the hammer in favor of the SAVE America Act, but that misunderstands his role and its powers. His core power is deciding what the Senate will or won’t consider — essentially all else flows from that. This meant Thune had the power to stop the SAVE America Act but not the power to force the SAVE America Act. All Thune could do was bring it to the Senate Floor, which he did. The bill’s failure under its own weight did the persuading.
Now as the Senate enters the run-up to the midterm elections, the decks are clear to advance priorities that help regular Americans. The Senate is ready to confirm a new Federal Reserve Chairman to combat inflation and a new slate of circuit and district judges to advance the rule of law.
The Senate can also get to the regular business of passing popular legislation and stand at the ready in the unlikely event there’s a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Luckily, whatever the Senate does between now and November, it will do so with a Majority Leader who knows his business.
Mike Fragoso is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who previously served as chief counsel to Sen. Mitch McConnell and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice.
