Congress

The Senate’s doomsday scenario

Published

1 year 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

Sanders to rally for Troy Jackson in Maine

Published

51 minutes ago

October 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Bernie Sanders will hit the road for Troy Jackson in Maine starting Oct. 10, the first time the progressive leader will stump for the candidate this cycle.

The Vermont independent plans to hold three rallies with Jackson, according to an itinerary shared first with Blue Light News: first in Bangor on Oct. 10th followed by Lewiston and Biddeford on Oct. 11.

The Maine swing will kick off Sanders’ travel for the final stretch of the midterms, covering ground throughout October for House and Senate candidates, POLITICO reported.

“Bernie and Troy know that working people built this country and deserve a government that fights for them,” Jackson spokesperson Dan Gottlieb told Blue Light News. “Susan Collins has had nearly 30 years to deliver, and working Mainers are still getting squeezed while she serves the billionaires and corporate interests who bankroll her campaigns. Mainers don’t need another six years of excuses.”

Sanders campaigned ahead of major wins for progressives in the primary season, speaking at more than 60 rallies since last year’s Fight the Oligarchy tour and endorsing more than 90 candidates up and down the ballot.

He’s also opening his substantial $23 million campaign war chest, POLITICO reported, and contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars toMinnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s Senate campaign and others including Angie Nixon in Florida and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison,

Sanders will return to Maine after initially backing Graham Platner’s campaign for Senate. Allegations reported by POLITICO ultimately led him to call on the Democratic nominee to drop out of the race.

Sanders had not formally endorsed Jackson since he clinched the nomination from Platner, though he previously backed Jackson’s initial run for governor.

Congress

Hill: Trump’s ‘lack of favorability’ creating challenging politics

Published

1 hour ago

October 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Financial Services Chair French Hill said he has “no concerns” about winning back his Arkansas seat in the upcoming midterm elections, but the six-term House member acknowledged the political headwinds for his party.

“I consider the atmosphere a very tough political environment right now because of President [Donald] Trump’s lack of favorability at the top, and you know people are concerned about, as I say, what it’s like to live under an inflated economy the last four years,” Hill said in an interview.

Hill is in a solidly red district, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, and said he is up against a “weaker candidate this time than I’ve had in past races.” Polling in the district, however, has shown a tighter race. The two polls done this year placed Democratic challenger Chris Jones ahead of Hill by a few percentage points. Any perceived polling victory for Jones is still well within the margin of error, and one of the polls had a Democratic sponsor.

Stephannie Lane Baker, a spokesperson for Jones, said that “of all the Republicans in Congress, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee doesn’t get to dodge responsibility for this economy. He’s in trouble, and he knows it.”

Additionally, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s PAC, Ready for the Fight, committed more than $1 million in television ads through the next five weeks for Jones’ race in Arkansas’s 2nd District, Jordan Abudayyeh, a spokesperson for the PAC confirmed. Overall Democratic spending on advertising for the race was just over $1 million, primarily made up by contributions from the Ready for the Fight PAC, with Republicans spending almost $2.7 million on ad buys, according to AdImpact, an advertising tracking service.

Hill said he has addressed affordability concerns “head on” this Congress.

“My work on housing, my work on the Price Stability Act, my work to try to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, and drop the federal budget deficit as a percentage of GDP,” Hill said. “All these things can contribute to a more affordable environment for people. So I’ve tried to make that a forefront of my campaign this year.”

Hill was a key architect of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan housing affordability bill that became law in July. The Price Stability Act, which is unlikely to become law this year, would narrow the Federal Reserve’s current dual mandate of pursuing maximum employment and price stability to focus exclusively on containing inflation.

Congress

Sanders, AOC, Merkley propose bill to ban Flock cameras

Published

7 hours ago

October 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on Friday released text of legislation intended to ban the use of Flock surveillance cameras and other license plate readers.

Flock has faced severe public backlash against the surveillance technology following reports that police officers misused the technology to track women, and it has the largest network of license plate readers across the U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) hosted a hearing last month probing its potential misuses, although the company’s CEO Garrett Langley did not appear.

The latest bill, unveiled Friday and named the Ban Flock Act, would bar federal agencies from using automated license plate readers or accessing data from the technology and prevent federal grants from funding states and local governments that use automated license plate readers.

“At a time of growing concern about the unchecked power of artificial intelligence, Flock is eviscerating the very notion of privacy by installing tens of thousands of cameras in communities across America without their consent,” Sanders, who has positioned himself as a leading progressive voice on AI technology, said in a statement. “We cannot allow America to become a surveillance state where a handful of AI oligarchs profit by giving the government the power to track our every movement.”

Ocasio-Cortez similarly condemned the surveillance capabilities of the technology and said the bill would “enforce our constitutional right to privacy and protect Americans from both corporate and government surveillance.”

“No one should have this unchecked surveillance power at their fingertips,” Merkley added.

Republicans have introduced similar efforts to regulate license plate readers, such as Hawley’s Stop Flock Abuse Act, which would require audits and limits on unauthorized searches.

Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.