Congress
Blast radius of Senate GOP’s latest ‘nuclear’ move could be limited
Republicans are preparing to again “go nuclear” on the Senate’s rules. The fallout this time could be limited.
Majority Leader John Thune filed a list of more than 40 nominees Monday night on the Senate floor, the first step toward a vote to change the chamber’s rules later this week that would allow group confirmations for most executive branch picks.
It’s the latest chapter in a long-running partisan fight over the chamber’s norms, which has seen senators slowly whittle away at rules that once demanded bipartisan support for confirmation of presidential nominees.
While Democrats are warning that the decision to speed up approval of most of President Donald Trump’s nominees will come back to bite Republicans, the Senate does not appear headed toward the kind of bitter showdown that marked some of the previous nomination battles.
“I say to my Republican colleagues, think carefully before taking this step. If you go nuclear, it’s going to be a decision you will come to regret,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Monday.
The New York Democrat predicted Trump would push political boundaries even further with his nominees now that they will no longer be voted on individually. But his comments also served as a reminder that turnabout will be fair play under a Democratic president with a Democratic Senate majority.
Even as Schumer issued that warning, however, he reiterated Democrats are open to a bipartisan deal with Republicans on the biggest challenge Congress faces this month: funding the government. Lawmakers have until the end of the month to avoid a shutdown, and they are likely to pass a short-term spending patch to avoid a lapse in spending.
They’re juggling the nominations fight with other political fires, too. Democrats are trying to get a deal to extend federal health insurance subsidies that will expire at the end of the year. Schumer, in his floor speech Monday, also talked about Trump’s judicial nominees, which are not included in the rules change, as well as the economy, saying that the “S.S. Trump is sinking before our eyes” and that Republican lawmakers are still on the ship.
Asked Monday if Republicans would face repercussions for their power move on confirmations, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said that they would — but added it was an issue for “tomorrow.”
Democrats are effectively powerless to prevent Republicans from changing the rules so long as 50 GOP senators plus Vice President JD Vance can stick together. But they also view Republicans’ desire to return to an earlier era, when nominees were confirmed with little fanfare, as a fever dream out of touch with the Senate’s political reality.
“We’re living now under the shadow of the JD Vance rule,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), referring to the now-vice president’s opposition to former President Joe Biden’s U.S. attorney nominees when Vance served as an Ohio senator.
That opposition, Durbin said, prevented Biden “from filling vacancies and many Democrats still remember it. If we’re going to come up with rules, they’ve got to apply to Democrats and Republicans as well.”
Republicans retort that the current Democratic blockade goes well beyond a small subset of Trump nominees — they have withheld unanimous consent for virtually all of the president’s picks, leaving a backlog of roughly 150 nominees waiting to get a floor vote. Leadership got close to notching a confirmations deal earlier this summer, but it unraveled after the White House balked at Democrats’ asking price: unfreezing some agency funding.
The list Thune moved forward with Monday included 48 appointees that received at least some Democratic support in committee. They are mostly low- and mid-level nominees to executive agencies and departments, as well as some ambassadorships — including the nominations of Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s ex-girlfriend, and Callista Gingrich, former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s wife, as envoys to Greece and Switzerland, respectively.
The move toward group confirmations is only the latest tit-for-tat in a nearly two-decade escalation over presidential personnel. Democrats, under Harry Reid, got rid of the 60-vote threshold for most nominees under President Barack Obama. Republicans under Mitch McConnell followed suit for Supreme Court picks. And Republicans subsequently changed the rules to make it faster to confirm most lower- and mid-level picks — steps Democrats used to their own advantage during Biden’s presidency.
Even with the nomination fight heating up again, there have been limits. Cabinet nominees and federal judges are not included in the new group-nominations precedent Republicans want to set, and Durbin said late last week that he was talking with Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) about trying to find a more “rational and sensible way” to deal with some of that panel’s nominees. Durbin, the top Democrat on Judiciary, declined to provide further details.
That doesn’t mean there haven’t been any consequences for Republicans’ latest nuclear strike.
Grassley tried to clear a tranche of nominees Monday for a second time but was blocked by Democrats. Schumer blamed Trump for the impasse and offered to reopen negotiations if Republicans would drop their plans to change Senate rules.
“If Republicans are dead-set on going nuclear, we will not grant consent today,” Schumer said.
GOP senators are aware their actions could be used against them in the future, but they say the slow-walking happening right now leaves them little choice.
“You always think about when the shoe is on the other foot, and that is ultimately going to happen at some point,” Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the Republican whip, told reporters last week. “But we’re trying to get back to the way this has been previously.”
Congress
DHS stopgap set for quick House action after Rules Committee vote
The House Rules Committee advanced a measure Friday evening that would fund the entirety of the Homeland Security Department through May 22 — without setting up debate or a separate vote on the funding bill itself.
The panel, after a raucous meeting that devolved into shouting at multiple points, voted 8-4 on party lines to advance the measure to the floor.
The rule includes a “deem and pass” provision, a tactic that allows legislation to be passed by the House automatically once the rule itself is adopted. While there will be one hour of floor debate and a vote on the rule, there will not be a standalone House vote on the DHS spending bill.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) described himself as needing “a neck brace” from the whiplash of hearing Republicans argue for hours that the Senate’s early-morning voice vote on a different DHS funding measure was “shameful” for lack of transparency and accountability.
House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) accused the Senate of moving their bill “in the middle of the night, with the smell of jet fumes in the air,” lamenting that the House was left “to take it or leave it.”
House leaders, McGovern suggested, have chosen a similar path by fast-tracking the eight-week DHS stopgap.
“You’re in charge,” he told Rules Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.). “You can do whatever the hell you want to do.”
Congress
Rand Paul weighs a 2028 presidential bid
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is considering a bid for president in 2028, as Republicans jockey for the future of the GOP post-Trump.
In a “CBS Sunday Morning” interview airing Sunday, a reporter asked Paul about an article that implied he would be running for president.
“We’re thinking about it,” Paul said. “I would say fifty-fifty,” adding that he would make a final decision after the midterm elections.
Paul ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 with a libertarianism-focused campaign but ultimately dropped out after a poor performance in the Iowa caucuses and a shortage of cash. He instead ran for reelection to the Senate.
Paul has had a complex relationship with his own party and with President Donald Trump, often finding himself the lone Republican on certain issues. More recently, he was the only Republican to support a joint resolution that would limit Trump’s war powers in Iran.
His father, former Rep. Ron Paul, also ran for president three times: first as a Libertarian in 1988, and twice as a Republican in 2008 and 2012.
Congress
‘Meltdown’: DHS shutdown set to drag on after House GOP rejects Senate deal
House Republicans moved Friday to further extend the six-week shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security by rejecting a Senate bill that would fund the vast majority of DHS agencies through September.
Instead, Speaker Mike Johnson proposed a temporary extension of DHS funding through May 22 — a plan that has uncertain prospects in the House and certainly won’t pass the Senate before the shutdown becomes the longest funding lapse in U.S. history Saturday.
But Johnson said House Republicans simply could not swallow the Senate bill, which omits funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Border Patrol and some other parts of Customs and Border Protection.
“The Republicans are not going to be any part of any effort to reopen our borders or to stop immigration enforcement,” he said. “We are going to deport dangerous criminal illegal aliens because it is a basic function of the government. The Democrats fundamentally disagree.”
The move toward an eight-week stopgap creates a tactical gulf between Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who called an end to weeks of abortive bipartisan talks Thursday and pushed through the funding bill in hopes of tacking on funding later for ICE and CBP in a party-line budget reconciliation bill.
President Donald Trump has largely stayed out of the GOP infighting on Capitol Hill, keeping his criticism trained on Democrats. He ordered DHS to pay TSA officers Thursday as long security lines snarls more U.S. airports.
Johnson played down the split with his Senate counterpart, saying the Democratic leader there bore more blame for the impasse.
“I wouldn’t call John Thune the engineer of this,” he said. “Chuck Schumer and the Democrats in the Senate have forced this upon the Senate. I have to protect the House. … Our colleagues on this side understand this is not a game. We are not playing their games.”
Thune said early Friday morning he did not speak directly to Johnson in the final hours leading up to the Senate’s voice vote, but he said they had texted. He acknowledged he did not know in advance how the House would handle the Senate bill.
“Hopefully they’ll be around, and we can get at least a lot of the government opened up again, and then we’ll go from there,” he said.
Johnson made his game plan clear with House Republicans on a private call just minutes before addressing reporters in the Capitol, according to four people granted anonymity to describe the call. He warned that a failure to advance the short-term DHS stopgap would upend GOP plans for a reconciliation bill, the people said.
He suggested the Senate could quickly clear the stopgap measure once it passes the House. Most senators have left Washington for a recess running through April 13, but Johnson said the chamber could approve the House measure by unanimous consent at a planned pro forma session Monday.
But some House Republicans on the private call, including Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida, aired doubts it could pass the Senate — or even the House. Some fellow GOP centrists argued that the House should just swallow the Senate bill and end the standoff.
The House plan for a 60-day stopgap won a cold reception in the Senate, with even Republicans warning it will only prolong the partial government shutdown.
The plan is instead fueling frustration among both Republicans and Democrats who view House Republicans as essentially throwing temper tantrum. Three people granted anonymity to speak candidly each described the House as having a “meltdown.”
Schumer publicly slammed the House GOP plan Friday, saying it was “dead on arrival” across the Capitol, “and Republicans know it.”
A Senate GOP aide granted anonymity to speak candidly added that the quickest way to end the shutdown is for the House to pass the Senate bill.
Five people granted anonymity to comment on Senate dynamics said there was no possibility that Democrats would let the House GOP plan pass during the Senate’s brief pro forma sessions over the next two weeks. It would only take one Democratic senator to show up and object to any attempt to pass it.
The bill, according to the five people, also can’t get 60 votes in the Senate once the chamber returns. Democrats have previously rejected even shorter stopgaps, leaving some to privately question why House Republicans would ever think their plan would work.
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