The Senate Thursday, after a couple tries and failed attempts, finally voted 53-43 to invoke cloture on restoring en bloc consideration of President Donald Trump’s nominations.
The move has implications for the president’s nominees to head nuclear-related offices within the Department of Energy, all of whom have cleared committee but await floor votes.
Brandon Williams at DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Tim Walsh at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and Thedore (Ted) Garrish at DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy are all currently playing the confirmation waiting game.
“Democrats now, for the past eight months of this administration, this president’s term in office, have resisted the idea of confirming any nominee by unanimous consent or voice – something that was a routine practice just up until this last eight months,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said in a Capitol press conference Tuesday, after he laid out plans to consider appointments in batches at a press conference at the Capitol Tuesday said. “And so as a consequence, President Trump, a lot of his nominees are sitting on the sidelines waiting to go to work. That’s got to change. This is a problem the Democrats created, and we intend to fix it.”
Thune continued to say that Senate Republicans have started the process of “getting a rules change in place” to restore the former precedent to processing nominees at a sub-cabinet level in batches.
Now that cloture is invoked, the Senate can debate on the matter for a maximum of 30 hours and cannot filibuster or potentially block the vote.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), also at the press conference, said he hoped by Monday Sept. 15 that the Senate could begin the process of officially confirming nominees in batches. He offered a resolution originally introduced two years prior by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), to allow a group of nominees advanced out of the same Senate committee to be considered en bloc. In a statement on his website Tuesday, Cornyn said Democrats originally blocked the resolution from passing.
“It’s abundantly clear that we’ve exhausted all the opportunities for negotiation,” Cornyn said on his website.
Thune’s office did not respond to a query by the Exchange Monitor on which nominees would be prioritized, and where nominees for the National Nuclear Security Administration were in the lineup.
