Congress

Delays fuel GOP blame game over Trump nominees

Published

1 year ago

January 8, 2025

With less than two weeks until Donald Trump takes the oath of office, only a small handful of his nominees appear on track for immediate confirmation — sparking tensions between the Senate GOP and Trump’s inner circle.

At a private lunch on Tuesday, Republican senators discussed whether they should — or even could, under law and Senate rules — advance Trump nominees without final FBI background checks, financial disclosures and other paperwork, according to a person in the room.

They discussed whether they could at least hold confirmation hearings without documents submitted, holding off on final action until the process is complete. And the subject of nominations could come up again Wednesday evening, when Trump meets with Republican senators on Capitol Hill.

The internal debate surrounds what has become an obsession for the president-elect and his top allies.

Soon after his victory in November, Trump and his allies pushed to get as many of his top officials confirmed on Day One as possible. Transition chair Howard Lutnick privately pushed Senate Republican leaders to make a splash with a bunch of Inauguration Day confirmations, according to a GOP aide, who like others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity to describe private discussions.

Trump loved the idea and proceeded to quickly announce key nominations for that very purpose. Yet several committee chairs have suggested it could be a week or more after the inauguration before key appointees see real progress, and a blame game is breaking out behind the scenes.

Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said a planned hearing for Trump’s attorney general pick, Pam Bondi, could be pushed back due to a delayed FBI background check. The Senate Intelligence Committee has not yet received a pre-hearing questionnaire from Director of National Intelligence designee Tulsi Gabbard, according to a person familiar with her confirmation, complicating plans to hold her hearing next week. (A spokesperson for Gabbard, Alexa Henning, said she is “working in lockstep” with the panel.)

Senate HELP Chair Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said much the same Tuesday about Education secretary pick Linda McMahon: “It really depends on us getting paperwork,” Cassidy said about the timeline. “Right now the hold seems to be on their side.”

Only a small handful of nominations — Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for secretary of State, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) for UN ambassador and John Ratcliffe for CIA director — appear to be in the conversation for potential Day 1 action.

As Cassidy intimated, the sniping is starting to bubble to the surface. Some Senate Republicans are privately bemoaning the Trump transition wasting time debating whether to conduct FBI background checks, which have long been standard procedure for high-level executive nominees. Distrustful of the FBI, Trump initially wanted to engage private firms instead, but Senate Republicans ultimately convinced him the confirmations would go smoother if he stuck with protocol.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has personally encouraged nominees in his meetings with them to get their paperwork in as fast as possible, according to a GOP official familiar with those conversations. Yet Republican aides say delays have persisted with some of them.

“If a nominee hasn’t submitted their paperwork in a timely fashion, there’s only so much the Senate can do,” said one of those GOP aides. “The Senate is doing everything we can to move forward, but there’s just a lot of bureaucracy.”

Amid the tensions, Thune has privately told Republicans that it’s up to individual committee chairs to decide how to handle their nominees — to stick with the established process or press ahead without full documentation.

Those in the latter camp appear to include Energy and Natural Resources Chair Mike Lee (R-Utah), who has moved to schedule a Jan. 14 hearing for Energy secretary nominee Doug Burgum over the objections of panel Democrats. They said Wednesday that they had not yet received Burgum’s paperwork.

“This is a breach of protocol and precedent, established over decades by Chairs of both parties,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the panel’s top Democrat, said.

Lee appears to be part of a bloc that “sees it like, we just need to move ahead and, you know, when these documents come in, they come in,” said one of the aforementioned Republican aides.

But other Republicans are balking at overriding longstanding committee rules. What’s the point of holding a hearing, they say, without having all the necessary information in hand?

“We think it’s important because we think it helps the individuals move through the process more smoothly than if they didn’t have it,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said Tuesday. “It just makes it a lot simpler to get through the process.”

The paperwork questions have been especially sensitive for nominees and committees related to national security. Trump advisers have been pushing Senate Republicans to prioritize those confirmations, especially after last week’s terror attack in New Orleans.

“The threats aren’t taking a pause while the Senate kinda thinks about it,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), the incoming national security adviser, said on Fox News last week. “We need them now.”

Asked Tuesday whether background checks are a prerequisite for hearings, Intelligence Chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who is handling the Gabbard and Ratcliffe nominations, had two words: “No comment.”

The sense of urgency from Trump and his allies doesn’t necessarily correspond to the recent historical record on early Cabinet confirmations. In 2017, he saw only two nominees confirmed on his first day: Defense Secretary James Mattis and Homeland Secretary Secretary John Kelly.

Most others — including his selections for attorney general and secretaries of State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, HHS, Commerce and Education — came in February, with still others seeing confirmation later in the spring.

President Joe Biden lagged further behind. He had no nominees confirmed on Jan. 20, 2021. Three were confirmed in January, five in February and the rest in March.

But Senate Republicans are looking to move faster amid fears that the Trump pressure campaign could mount, which has caused “anxiety” among committee chairs, the previously mentioned GOP aide told us. So far Trump himself has suggested Democrats are to blame for any delays — not his own team’s documentation snafus. But there are signs that the pressure is about to turn to Senate Republicans.

Thune has privately spoken about wanting to return to the “Obama-era” confirmation standard, referring to the nearly dozen nominees President Barack Obama saw confirmed during his first week in office. As POLITICO reported Tuesday, he has started conversations with Democrats about trying to move noncontroversial nominees quickly that first week.

But Thune is also protective of the Senate’s prerogatives — and the wishes of his members who want to preserve them.

“I think you give great deference and latitude to a president when it comes to people he wants to put into key positions,” Thune said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “But the Senate has a role: advise and consent. … We have a lot of our senators who take that role very seriously.”

Jordain Carney, John Sakellariadis, Ursula Perano and Mackenzie Wilkes contributed to this report.

Congress

Senate Republicans want a say on Trump’s Iran deal

Published

4 hours ago

June 16, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump is touting a deal that would end the monthslong war with Iran — and potentially ease some of the political headwinds bearing down on Republicans.

GOP lawmakers still have lots of questions.

The absence of publicly released text for the “memorandum of understanding” Vice President JD Vance reportedly signed with Iranian officials Sunday left an information vacuum on Capitol Hill, where senators of both parties were left airing concerns about what the deal might entail.

Even most Republicans agreed: More information needs to come to Congress soon, and any agreement touching on the future of the Iranian nuclear program would have to eventually be subject to a congressional vote.

“If you want a deal to last, it can’t be an executive agreement,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.). “We’ve got to have a vote of Congress to be able to solidify [it] long term.”

The bipartisan scrutiny of the long-brewing agreement is a legacy of the last Iran nuclear deal, consummated more than a decade ago by then-President Barack Obama amid a bipartisan uproar over trading sanctions relief and cash concessions to the Iranian regime in return for curbs on its nuclear ambitions.

Trump withdrew from the deal in his first term, and now he is back with an agreement that — pending release of the text and final negotiations yet to come — could end up looking like Obama’s deal. That has raised the hackles of both defense hawks who despised the original agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and Democrats who believe Trump never should have left it in the first place.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of those defense hawks, told reporters that he was “pulling for a deal,” while also making note of serious discrepancies in the terms that have emerged thus far.

“The MOU being described by us sounds really very good; the MOU being described by Iran sounds awful,” Graham said.

“If they can enrich [uranium] anywhere at all, then it’s the same as JCPOA. If they can’t enrich, then that makes it a good deal,” he continued, adding in a separate conversation that he was “skeptical that Iran will ever go there” to cease enrichment.

The Trump administration said it expects release of the memorandum of understanding no later than Friday.

The possibility that Congress would take any kind of vote on the agreement is also a legacy of the 2015 deal. Amid bipartisan concern about the Obama administration’s pursuit of nuclear talks, the GOP-controlled House and Senate that year passed legislation allowing for congressional review of any agreement dealing with the Iranian nuclear program.

That law, however, does not require Congress to approve a deal — it rather gives it the ability to kill a deal via a disapproval resolution that could be subject to presidential veto. That means each chamber would have to effectively muster a two-thirds majority to block Trump, something it did not come close to doing in 2015.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday there is “probably some expectation” that his chamber would ultimately vote on the agreement while declining to weigh in on the particulars.

“I just don’t know enough about it yet, and I don’t think even the people who follow this stuff closely up here know that much about it,” he said, adding that he expected Vance or other administration officials to brief members on the deal at some point.

The lack of specificity was par for the course on Capitol Hill Monday, with many senators expressing exasperation that text of the signed agreement has not yet been released.

“If it’s a secret deal, then how can I take it seriously?” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters.

The agreement reportedly includes reopening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, but it’s not clear to what degree Iran will be required to abandon its nuclear program. Vance indicated in a series of interviews that the administration will attempt to ensure Iran does not develop or obtain a nuclear weapon but left details regarding civilian nuclear facilities and potential uranium enrichment unaddressed.

The White House circulated talking points to Hill Republicans Monday touting the deal including that “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon” and “energy prices … are coming down,” according to a copy of the document reviewed by Blue Light News. The administration also argued in the memo that the agreement “beats” the Obama-era agreement.

In the absence of further details, senators mainly agreed that they wanted a chance to formally review and vote on the deal — even as some Republicans predicted the administration would find a way to avoid that happening.

“I don’t expect that to happen,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said about a vote. “They’ll try to write it around the treaty requirements, so I don’t expect we’ll vote on it.”

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said the administration should send the deal to Congress “if they want it to be something other than a political agreement, like the JCPOA was.”

Most congressional Republicans have been eager for Trump to find a way out of the nearly four-month war, which has driven up energy prices ahead of the November elections. Thune predicted Monday that a deal would “have a very positive impact on the economic situation in the country and that obviously will translate into the political situation in the country.”

Some of Trump’s most vocal allies on Capitol Hill praised the agreement Monday.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said has had conversations with senior White House officials and he was “very hopeful.” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who is likely the next Senate GOP campaign chair, added on X: “President Trump deserves our trust and support as he works to bring peace to the Middle East.”

Democrats were largely keeping their powder dry Monday on how they would handle a vote on the agreement. Some could find it hard to oppose a deal that ends hostilities on negotiated terms roughly similar to what was secured under a Democratic president in 2015.

But plenty of Democrats questioned what was gained by the conflict.

“We still don’t know the details,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor. “The American people need to know exactly what’s in the deal. … We know this for certain: We are worse off than before Trump began his foolish war of choice.”

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

Congress

Thune is ‘hopeful’ Mitch McConnell will return this week

Published

8 hours ago

June 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday he hopes his predecessor as top Republican, Mitch McConnell, returns this week from a hospitalization.

Thune said he had not yet spoken directly with the 84-year-old Kentuckian but is getting “readouts from his staff.”

Asked about McConnell’s condition or if he knew if he would be back this week, Thune told reporters, “I’m hopeful that he’ll be back this week.”

A McConnell spokesperson said Sunday that he had been admitted to the hospital but did not provide details on his condition or why he was hospitalized — a break from recent prior instances where the seven-term senator was hospitalized.

A former McConnell staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity was told the senator was doing much better Monday without any further details on what put him in the hospital.

Daniel Desrochers contributed to this report.

Congress

Senate to confirm Jay Clayton as soon as Thursday

Published

10 hours ago

June 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Senate could vote as soon as Thursday on Jay Clayton’s nomination to serve as director of national intelligence — a lightning speed pace that will necessitate buy-in from all 100 senators.

Confirming Clayton could help shore up enough votes from Democrats to extend a government surveillance program that expired last Friday over opposition to Trump’s pick for acting director, Bill Pulte.

“He will come out of the committee Thursday, at least hopefully, and then if we get consent, we can move,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in an interview Monday about Clayton, who Trump only nominated for the job late last week.

Democrats “ought to be happy with Clayton,” said Thune, adding that he’s a “good” and “solid” pick.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, floated Sunday to CBS News that Clayton could be confirmed this week if every senator cooperates.

Senate Intelligence will hold a hearing Wednesday on Clayton’s nomination. If every member of the panel agrees, he could then get a committee vote Thursday. Confirming Clayton on the Senate floor hours later would require getting agreement from every senator to speed up the process. Opposition from a single member will punt Clayton’s confirmation to next week.

Confirming Clayton Thursday would, crucially, limit — and potentially circumvent — Pulte from becoming acting director of national intelligence, which Trump has slated to take place Friday, June 19.

The president’s decision to put Pulte in charge after Tulsi Gabbard’s departure at the helm of the Office of National Intelligence sparked bipartisan pushback, with Democrats saying they will withhold support for extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act while Pulte is in the acting role. Congress allowed the key government spy authority lapse last Friday without a deal.

Trump threw another curveball into a FISA extension over the weekend when he posted on social media that he was against reauthorizing Section 702 unless a GOP elections bill is attached. That bill, known as the SAVE America Act, does not have the votes to get through Congress.

Thune threw cold water Monday on tying the two issues together.

“Yeah, he’s, as you know, passionate about getting that done and wants to use every opportunity to take a shot at it,” Thune said of Trump and his desire to enact the elections bill.

But, Thune said, “we can’t get FISA done” if the policies are linked.