Congress

The Senate’s doomsday scenario

Published

7 months ago

September 16, 2025

Senators mostly agree the process for confirming a president’s nominees is broken. They also know it could easily get worse.

This week’s “nuclear” rules change by Senate Republicans — allowing most of President Donald Trump’s nominees to be confirmed in groups — is only the latest hammer lawmakers have taken to the once collegial nominations process.

The rancor could be turned up even higher, however, in a scenario the Senate hasn’t faced since it first changed the confirmation rules along party lines more than a decade ago: a newly elected president facing a majority of a different party.

Split government colliding with the first year of a president’s tenure has been rare in recent history. It hasn’t happened since 2001, when George W. Bush faced an ultra-tight Senate margin that flipped the majority back and forth between parties. And in the two decades since, the nominations process in the Senate has grown consistently more partisan, with more hurdles and longer wait times for confirmations.

The Senate saw a hint of how the chamber’s recent nominations warfare could play out in such a scenario in 2015 and 2016, when Republicans held the majority during the final two years of former President Barack Obama’s term. His second attorney general nominee, Loretta Lynch, waited five months to be confirmed. And that standoff was only a precursor for a cataclysmic battle that still hangs over the chamber today: then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to hold a Supreme Court seat open for more than a year.

But the stakes would be exponentially higher after a presidential election where every Cabinet position, not to mention hundreds of lower and mid-level executive branch nominees, plus any judicial vacancies, would need to be filled.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) put McConnell’s move after Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2016 death in a category of its own, arguing that it was the pinnacle of the Senate’s recent confirmation fights. But he acknowledged a new president would need to “work with” an opposing majority if he or she wanted nominees confirmed.

Presidents, he said, would need to be “thoughtful” about nominees who are “confirmable.”

Yet bipartisan support for nominees has waned over the years, which has been reflected in the rising number of nominees who have had to overcome once rare procedural hurdles.

During the first 200 days of his second administration, Trump’s nominees faced the longest delay in recent administrations between nomination and confirmation, according to data from the Partnership for Public Service. And Democrats have forced nearly twice as many nominees to overcome procedural hurdles before a final vote compared to what Joe Biden faced from Senate Republicans by this same point.

Max Stier — president and CEO of the partnership, which runs an initiative focused on presidential transitions — said that Senate majorities have always had the ability to block nominations. But with the current rules change, he added, “the system that envisioned separation of powers is now seeing separation by party.”

“This is a significant ramping-up of that phenomenon,” he said. “The question is, are we watching our government being fully eaten up by the competition between teams?”

Gridlock from the minority party is what then-Majority Leader Harry Reid cited when Democrats first deployed the “nuclear option” in 2013 to lower the confirmation threshold for executive branch nominees and most judicial picks from 60 to 51. Republicans under McConnell took the same step in 2017 for Supreme Court picks and then sped up the debate time for most other nominees two years later.

“I don’t think the Democrats have ever voted for a Trump judicial [nominee] and I don’t want our side to become like that,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), predicting that “some Republicans, maybe not a majority,” would vote for a Democratic president’s nominees in the split scenario.

Some senators have recognized the pitfalls of the current partisan gridlock. Last week, a handful of lawmakers launched a last-minute effort to avert a party-line rules change, and those involved in the deal believed they were close to an agreement that would have allowed for the simultaneous confirmation of up to 15 nominees — an idea they believed could get supermajority support.

But they couldn’t get consent from all 100 senators to move forward, and Republicans — not convinced that Democrats would actually cut a deal — pulled the plug and moved forward with the party-line approach which allows for unlimited simultaneous confirmations. That brief glimmer of bipartisanship quickly gave way to recriminations about the calcifying fault lines in the chamber’s nominations fights.

“The nominations process is broken and in desperate need of an overhauling,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who accused Republicans of watering down the Senate’s “advise and consent” role.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) added that he worried “to some degree” about the possibility that a Republican Senate would stall Democratic nominees. But he also offered a warning: “I think they ought to be worried about a Dem president and a Dem Senate just putting people together in blocks.”

Democrats openly warned Republicans they were setting a precedent that could be used against them when they are out of power. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it “won’t take very long for Republicans to wish they had not pushed the chamber further down this awful road.”

While Republican senators defended their decision to go nuclear — claiming some Democrats privately agreed the Senate was spending too much time processing nominations — they also acknowledged the threat of a larger war looms.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the possibility of interbranch gridlock amounted to “another problem” the Senate would eventually have to deal with.

“Nothing’s easy,” he added.

Congress

New Jersey’s most vulnerable GOP incumbent is MIA

Published

3 hours ago

April 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Tom Kean Jr. represents New Jersey’s most competitive district this November — but nobody, even his GOP colleagues, can say where he’s been for the past month.

A scion of one of the state’s most storied political dynasties, Kean’s team says the two-term congressmember is facing unspecified health issues. The New Jersey Republican hasn’t voted since March 5 and has missed almost 50 roll call votes.

The other two Republicans in the New Jersey delegation, Reps. Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew, said they have called and texted Kean out of concern for his health. But so far, neither said they have heard from him. Van Drew said it’s been “radio silence.”

Several New York Republicans who have worked with Kean on key issues said similarly. Kean’s absence has largely fallen under the radar and GOP leaders haven’t addressed the issue to the conference, according to several Republicans.

One Republican, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), said he didn’t even realize Kean had been missing until he tried to find him on the House floor Tuesday.

“I was looking for him,” Bacon said in an interview Wednesday. “I didn’t know it was that long.”

“I know the congressman and his family appreciate all of the well wishes and support,” Kean consultant Harrison Neely told Blue Light News. “Please know that he will be back on a regular full schedule very soon.”

Closer to home, Kean’s allies also expect him to come back soon.

“I don’t even know the truth myself or even enough to disclose any information,” Union County GOP Chair Carlos Santos told Blue Light News. “But I have been texting with him and was told he’ll be fine and make a full recovery in the next couple weeks.”

Kean represents New Jersey’s most competitive House seat — the 7th Congressional District, a large swath across the northern and central part of the state that includes Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster. President Donald Trump narrowly carried it by one point in the 2024 presidential race, but Democratic former Rep. Mikie Sherrill carried the district by nearly two points in the 2025 governor’s race. Kean won the district by around five points in 2024.

Kean enters reelection in what could be his most challenging congressional bid to date. He faces an environment that is increasingly challenging for Republicans and the Trump administration is opening an immigration detention facility in his district while pulling funding for a major infrastructure project for New Jersey commuters — both of which have put him in a precarious position.

But Kean’s backers say his temporary absence will hardly be on voters’ minds come November.

“Everyone understands from their own family experiences that people run into unexpected health issues,” Bill Palatucci, a Republican National Committee member and attorney to the Kean campaign, told Blue Light News. “Voters will be completely sympathetic and it’s so early in the year that it will be long forgotten come the fall.”

There is a competitive Democratic primary to take on Kean, with four prominent candidates.

Democrats in the New Jersey delegation have also noticed his absence and have started to be concerned for the congressmember’s health. Those members have also not heard anything.

“It’s been a long absence,” New Jersey Democrat Rep. Rob Menendez said. “I hope he’s doing all right. But I haven’t heard anything.”

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

Congress

Vote-a-Rama starts tonight

Published

4 hours ago

April 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Senate will kick off a marathon amendment voting session Wednesday night as Republicans aim to adopt a budget blueprint for immigration enforcement funding.

The chamber is expected to start the vote-a-rama free-for-all around 8 p.m., according to three people granted anonymity to disclose private scheduling. Senate Republicans need to adopt the budget resolution in order to subsequently pass their bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through the party-line budget reconciliation process.

Congress

Senate eyes AI expansion for congressional business

Published

4 hours ago

April 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Senate’s top cybersecurity official is aiming to expand the number of AI licenses and approved AI tools available to Senate staff — and it will come with a price tag.

The Senate sergeant at arms, the chief law enforcement official on Capitol Hill whose office also manages IT and logistics, is seeking a $2.8 million boost for the department’s fiscal 2027 budget for AI licenses as appetite grows in Congress for using large language models in day-to-day workflow.

“About 10 percent of Senate users have already used the free, unsupported version of this technology,” Senate Sergeant at Arms Jennifer Hemingway told the Senate Appropriations Legislative Branch subcommittee Wednesday. “Moving those users and other Senate users into Senate-supported versions of these platforms is necessary to protect Senate data.”

In March, the Senate green-lighted the use of Google’s Gemini chat, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot in Senate offices with licenses that support enhanced data security measures compared with the free versions. Staff in the House have been using Copilot, Gemini and ChatGPT, as well as Anthropic’s Claude, approved platforms under the chamber’s internal AI guidelines.

The cybersecurity team in Hemingway’s office is currently conducting risk assessments on about 40 AI tools, she told lawmakers. The sergeant at arms plans to bring recommendations for AI tools for Senate use to the bipartisan AI Governance Board, and “if the AI products meet our defined criteria,” make more tools available to the Senate.

“The most popular on that list is Claude,” Hemingway noted. The sergeant at arms began assessing the Anthropic product March 3.

When pressed by ranking member Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) about the sergeant at arms’ policy of issuing one license per Senate user, Hemingway explained that the protocol is designed in part to incentivize staff to use data-protected versions approved by the sergeant at arms.

“If there is demand to have more than once license per user, we’d be happy to have conversations” with the Legislative Branch panel that funds the sergeant at arms, Hemingway said, calling it a “resource issue.”

She added that staff whose work focuses on AI and who need access to multiple tools could be accommodated very quickly.