There’s a crisis brewing on the Senate’s Executive Calendar. A staggering number of nominees are languishing on the Senate Floor because Democrats refuse to cut any nominations deals at all. Even in the run-up to the August recess — prime dealmaking time — Democrats stood firm (Sen. Chuck Schumer offered some low-hanging fruit in exchange for high-priority funding restoration, a hostage-taking non-starter).
There’s no reason to think this obstruction will stop naturally, so Senate Republicans should stop it themselves.
According to the Washington Post, 126 Trump nominees have been confirmed, while 241 are still being considered by the Senate. This confirmation number is in line with where it was under President Joe Biden and during the first Trump administration, but that statistic is misleading. Only one Trump nominee has not been filibustered: then-sitting Senator Marco Rubio. Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) has, thus, been able to confirm this many nominees through a constant stream of confirmation votes.
The Senate in 2025 had taken more votes by July 24 than all but four prior calendar years of voting. In other words, while Thune is keeping pace, it’s while on a death march.
How did we get here? Unsurprisingly, it’s the Democrats who started it in the first Trump administration. Following the use of the nuclear option by Sen. Harry Reid (D., Nev.) in 2013, the unified government of 2017 had a clear path to confirm strong conservatives to the bench and to the administration without fear of a successful filibuster. To counter this, Democrats began to require cloture petitions on ever more nominations, and then only negotiated down the thirty-hours of post-cloture time individually after cloture was invoked.
The result was an unprecedented slog. As one think tank showed, while only seven nominees were returned to Obama at the start of 2010, 85 were sent back to Trump in 2018. Republicans eventually fixed much of this in 2019 when Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) changed the rules to reduce most post-cloture time to two hours.
Republicans also paid Democrats back in spades when Biden took over, rarely agreeing to deals. But reading the Congressional Record, you still see some confirmations still went by unanimous consent in the day’s “wrap up.” Deals still took place and it wasn’t complete obstruction.
Now it is complete obstruction and obstruction that’s different in kind. Most traditional nomination deals involve a give and take of picks preferred by both sides, but nominees today aren’t being blocked for that. Sometimes individual senators do block nominees in order to wrest related policy concessions from an administration or to receive answers to oversight, but that’s not happening either.
As we saw from Schumer’s proposed deal, this is a blockade to effectuate broad, unrelated policy change. That isn’t new in and of itself — after all, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.) blocked all flag officers over Department of Defense abortion policy, and then-Sen. J.D. Vance (R., Ohio) blocked most U.S. Attorneys over the lawfare against Trump. Of course (1) neither effort succeeded and (2) there’s a difference between blanket holds being orchestrated by freshmen senators and those being field-marshalled by Senate leadership.
These blanket holds are causing real problems, too. There are five district judges (with more on the way) being blocked, as well as two DOJ officials and eight U.S. Attorneys (more coming there, too). There are six agency general counsels stuck on the Floor alongside 21 ambassadors and thirteen Department of Defense officials. As we try and achieve energy dominance as a country, a dozen Department of Energy officials are stalled. The list could go on.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Republicans should take aggressive steps under the Senate Rules to put a stop to it. The fact is that the filibuster was never intended to prevent the executive branch from staffing up.
The filibuster derives from the core Senate principles of freedom-of-debate and freedom-of-amendment. In other words, the filibuster is about the broad powers given to senators to influence legislation. It ensures the rights of the minority in the legislative process so that major legislation — if enacted — is enacted with bipartisan, cross-sectional support and is therefore likely to stand the test of time.
You can’t amend a nominee. The fundamental purpose of the filibuster is simply inapposite on the Executive Calendar. That’s why Senator Schumer’s norm-shredding exercise of filibustering George W. Bush’s circuit-court nominees was so shocking and damaging over the long term: it was a category error that confused the traditional practice of the Senate. The quarter-decade of squabbling about the Executive Calendar is all downstream from that choice by Schumer and the Democrat caucus.
That lingering confusion about the purpose of the filibuster today has the disastrous effect hobbling the energetic exercise of executive power. Because it’s based on a confusion about the Senate Rules, Senate Republicans should lose no sleep in using those rules to confound the Democrats.
Republicans should use their power to establish precedent to further streamline the processing of lower-court, sub-cabinent, and board-and-commission nominees. Cabinet-level and circuit-court nominees are rare and important enough that, perhaps, they ought to continue as before.
Republicans have many options at their command. They can reduce post-cloture time to zero. They can allow for the consideration of nominees en bloc. They can devise a new method to vitiate cloture. In general, though, it’s wise to leave the tactics to Leadership, which has proven itself extraordinarily shrewd this Congress. But the strategy should be unmistakable: remove the reality of mass obstruction from the Executive Calendar.
This, importantly, won’t mean that the Senate becomes a rubber stamp. If a Republican has an issue with a nominee, the odds are he or she still won’t get a vote. This will be a function of politics, though, not the operation of the rules. Likewise Democrats can still oppose nominees — and vice versa when the shoe is on the other foot — if they can convince Republicans to go along with them on particular nominees.
Ironically moving away from total blockade to efficient processing may have the effect of facilitating bipartisan engagement. Right now engagement means convincing every single Democrat to let a nominee through; under a reformed rule engagement will mean convincing a handful of Republicans to stop one. In other words, if you remove the incentives for obstruction from the Executive Calendar it will reward future Kyrsten Sinemas, while the current practice empowers the Elizabeth Warrens.
The nomination backlog is only going to continue, and the longer it does, the worse it will be for effective administration in the executive branch. Senate Republicans should put a stop to it, and they should do it as soon as they can so that these nominees can get to work doing the People’s business.
Michael A. Fragoso is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a partner at Torridon Law PLLC. He was previously chief counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell.