Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) is breaking another record as the Senate begins processing a fifth en banc batch of nominations from President Donald Trump.
Thune and his Senate GOP colleagues have already confirmed more of Trump’s nominees faster in Trump’s second term than they had been able to do during Trump’s first term in office. On Monday, Thune and his colleagues started the process of confirming another 74 of Trump’s civilian nominees. Once those nominees are confirmed as expected next week, the Senate will be firmly ahead of its pace in confirming nominees that it set in the first Trump term.
The nominees in this latest batch include the commissioner of labor statistics, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 17 ambassadors, one deputy secretary, and more.
Following this group of confirmations, Senate Republicans will have confirmed 375 civilian nominees since they reformed the Senate’s rules; that amounts to over 60 percent of Trump’s total confirmed civilian nominees.
But Thune has not only shepherded the confirmation of hundreds of Trump’s civilian nominees; he has also set a historic rate of confirming Article III judges, confirming 24 percent more than had been confirmed at the same time in Trump’s first term. 52 judges have been confirmed during Trump’s second term; those judges include Benjamin Flowers, Daniel Traynor, Antonio Pozos, and Michael Martin.
Thune’s success comes despite historic obstruction from Senate Democrats; for months into his second term, he had been the only president to have zero civilian nominees confirmed by either voice vote or by unanimous consent. Only one percent of his nominees have now been confirmed by voice vote. By contrast, in his first term, 65 percent of his civilian nominees were confirmed by voice vote or by unanimous consent.
Even more recently, Senate Democrats attempted unsuccessfully to delay the nomination of Jay Clayton to serve as Trump’s next Director of the Office of National Intelligence (ODNI), despite widespread praise for the pick; the Senate recently confirmed Clayton on a partisan basis, putting him in place to succeed Bill Pulte as the head of ODNI.
