It’s a pity those servicepeople are getting caught in the middle.
Rather than do nothing, I’d like to see the Senate go ahead and start the individual approvals with absolutely no August break or any break until the task was finished. I would bet that all of a sudden Tuberville might suddenly cave or be unexpectedly absent on a day when a majority vote was decided on. Those senators dearly love their summer vacation…
They’re already on August recess (vacation starts early when you’re a United States Senator!). Which leads me to another option – Biden could recess appoint all 250+ officers and essentially dare Senate Republicans to allow all 250+ to lose their jobs at the end of the session.
President Biden today reversed a last-minute decision by the Trump Administration to relocate the US Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama. While I’m sure this was the right decision for the reasons in the article, I also can’t help but think that as Biden was signing the order he said, “Sorry, Tommy” with a smirk.
The Senate has not recessed in many years precisely to avoid such situations.
That all said, even though everyone talks about the “August recess,” Congress hasn’t technically formally recessed for August since 2016. …
Starting in 2017, when members of both parties were reportedly concerned about President Donald Trump firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replacing him with a lackey who would kill an ongoing investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, Congress dropped the entire business of formally declaring an August recess. “It’s actually easier, instead of going through the legislative process of a concurrent resolution per the 1970 Act, [to] just reach agreement for a break using these pro formas,” Holt said.
And in any case, there might now be five or six votes on the Supreme Court for Antonin Scalia’s concurrence in NLRB v. Noel Canning, which would have only permitted recess appointments when the vacancy begins during the recess.
I’m aware. But Democrats are in charge of the Senate - they don’t have to continue to agree to these pro forma sessions. A Democratic Senator could make a motion to adjourn for a month, such a motion is nondebatable and cannot be filibustered.
The hitch is that, under the Constitution, neither chamber may adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other, which the Republican House would not grant. But the Constitution also gives the President authority, should the chambers disagree on the timing of adjournment, to adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper. Trump threatened to do this when he couldn’t get some of his appointments through.
So the Space Command stays in Colorado. Damn, there goes Biden’s chance to carry Alabama.
How do you solve a problem like Tuberville?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Tuberville?
A flibbertijibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!
The way to solve morons like Tuberville is to have an educated electorate. That ship sailed long ago. If the people of a state are determined to elect someone on the basis of being a football coach, then that state is beyond hope and redemption.
How to solve the impasse on military promotions? Work around it. Bring a vote on each and every one. The complaint is that it takes weeks. It has already taken months. Work around this clown and it might discourage the next Bozo.
I’m not comfortable throwing the baby out with the bathwater re: Alabama. Not sure that moving Space Force to Alabama would be the best carrot, but clearly work must be done.
Would having Nick Saban taking the other Senate seat be enough to prove the state is hopeless?
The complaint is not that it will take weeks. The complaint is that it will takes weeks during which no other business can be conducted. As much as we like to complain our government doesn’t do anything, that’s not literally true but would be true for the time set aside for this.
If there are 200 nominations being held up, that would probably be 400 votes (cloture and confirmation on each nominee). In 2022, the Senate held 421 recorded votes. In 2020, it was just 292. A “vote-a-rama” on a reconciliation bill might be 30 or 40 votes, and everyone talks about how terrible it is. Senate procedures are simply not set up for stuff like this to be the least bit contested.
(IMO there shouldn’t be a floor process for nominations at all. Have a sign-up sheet in a cloakroom, like if the senators were going to be having a potluck, and when it gets 51 signatures the process is done.)
But it’s not the votes themselves that take up all of that time. Even the slowest vote procedure, calling on each Senator by name, only takes a few minutes: At that rate, you could get through all of these in an afternoon. And all of the other bits that do take up time can be done away with by the party in control.
Yes, the Senate would be very different if a majority of senators were willing to make it different. You could probably repeat that over and over going back to 1789.
After a successful cloture motion, there is allowed up to 30 hours of additional consideration on the nomination. This includes time taken up by debate, procedural motions, quorum calls, etc. Tuberville and any Republican allies could certainly force the Senate to spend hours on each nomination.
Let them take their time then, and Schumer can not let them go to recess until their work is done.
Please tell that you guys know there will be a long and bitter government shutdown if the budget bills can’t be passed. I don’t want to hear that “the Republicans will get the blame”. That’s not what Fox News will be telling them. Real people will suffer real hurt. The economy will suffer real hurt. The Democrats will suffer real hurt. The Republicans will get to dance on television and their ratings will go up.
This is not the answer.
Let’s say Tuberville and a few Republican allies are able to use up just 10 hours of the 30 hours of post-cloture debate allowed on nominees. With 250 held nominations, that’s 2,500 hours of Senate floor time. If Shumer kept the Senate in 24 hours a day, that would take 100 days to work through.
And during that time, the Senate cannot address anything else. There are 12 appropriations bills that fund the various components of the federal government that need to be enacted by September 30 or we have a government shutdown. The Farm bill and the FAA Reauthorization need to be enacted by September 30. There are dozens of other executive branch and judicial nominations that are awaiting action by the Senate. None of it can get done if we’re stuck debating each and every military nomination.
The Dems are going to have to change rhe procedures so that they can confirm the appointees. There simply is no alternative.
And how many of those 24 hour days in a row do you think his fellow Republican Senators would be willing to endure before they take him out back and shoot him talk some sense into him?
This isn’t about actually doing this, it’s about calling their bluff, and making them think you really are crazy enough to do this. At some point, someone needs to get in their face about this kind of shit. Reasonable discussion has failed, and will continue to fail so long as Republicans see that acting like a complete shitbag works.