WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has confirmed 48 of President Donald Trump’s nominees at once, voting for the first time under new rules to begin clearing a backlog of executive branch positions that had been delayed by Democrats.
Frustrated by the stalling tactics, Senate Republicans moved last week to make it easier to confirm large groups of lower-level, non-judicial nominations. Democrats had forced multiple votes on almost every one of Trump’s picks, infuriating the president and tying up the Senate floor.
The new rules allow Senate Republicans to move multiple nominees with a simple majority vote — a process that would have previously been blocked with just one objection. The rules don’t apply to judicial nominations or high-level Cabinet posts.
“Republicans have fixed a broken process,” Thune said ahead of the vote.
The Senate voted 51-47 to confirm the four dozen nominees. Thune said that those confirmed on Thursday had all received bipartisan votes in committee, including deputy secretaries for the Departments of Defense, Interior, Energy and others.
Among the confirmed are Jonathan Morrison, the new administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Kimberly Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece. Guilfoyle is a former California prosecutor and television news personality who led the fundraising for Trump’s 2020 campaign and was once engaged to Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
This is just a long worn out excuse that I’ve been seeing people claim for decades now. When Democrats are in power, they always claim they can’t accomplish anything meaningful because of Republican opposition. When Republicans are in power, Democrats always claim they can accomplish anything meaningful because they can’t oppose anything. The reality in both cases is that Democrats capitulate to Republicans every time. This is because they don’t work the American people. They work for their wealthy donors who are the same wealthy donors the Republicans work for. The rest is just an act to convince people that the parties oppose one another when they really don’t.
When Obama was president and Dems controlled both chambers of congress, they still watered down their own legislation in order to “reach across the aisle” even though it didn’t accomplish a damn thing and didn’t help a single American. They also handed over Obama’s SCOTUS nomination to Republicans and then gave what should have been Biden’s SCOTUS nomination to Trump without a fight which is how we got a 6-3 stacked Supreme Court. Currently we have people like Schumer passing Republican legislation, hundreds of house Dems voting against impeaching Trump, both parties in complete alignment on Gaza, both parties voting unanimously to pass dystopian legislation like The TAKE IT DOWN Act.
Both parties are rotten and working toward the same goal. To think anything else is naive. Stop falling for the kayfabe.