The effort to speed the confirmation of President Donald J. Trump’s nominees reportedly gained significant momentum Tuesday after Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, the chamber’s second-ranking Republican, endorsed a rule change to bypass what he called unprecedented Democratic obstruction.
In an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal, Barrasso denounced Senate Democrats for orchestrating what he described as a “radical resistance strategy” to stall nearly all of the president’s appointments.
“President Trump has more than 1,000 senior-level appointments that require Senate confirmation. Under a radical Democratic resistance strategy, the Senate has so far confirmed only 135,” Barrasso wrote. “Confirming even the most routine nominees is now a bitter fight.”
Barrasso accused Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of deliberately wasting floor time on nominees who, under past administrations, would have been approved in seconds through unanimous consent or simple voice votes.
“Democrats have forced multiple roll-call votes on more than 40 nominees for posts never subject to a single one,” Barrasso wrote. “These confirmations used to take seconds. Now, each can take days.”
For Republicans, the standoff underscores what they see as a deliberate campaign of sabotage, designed less to scrutinize nominees than to weaken the Trump administration’s ability to govern.
Schumer, however, has not hidden his intentions. Appearing on The Parnas Perspective podcast on Aug. 14, the Democratic leader openly bragged about his party’s obstruction. “Damn straight we’re blocking these nominees,” Schumer said. “We can use every tool in the toolbox to delay them, and we have.”
Framing the tactic as principled resistance, Schumer defended his caucus’s strategy as a necessary counterweight. “Historically bad nominees need a historic response,” he said. “And so we did. We blocked them all, and they were frustrated. Trump howled.”
But Republicans argue that the scale of Democratic obstruction is without precedent. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota, expressed frustration at the pace of confirmations and endorsed the idea of revisiting the chamber’s rules. “If you’re sitting here in August and you’ve only got 10 or 11 percent of the people that you’ve nominated for these positions actually confirmed, something is broken,” Thune told ABC affiliate KOTA-TV last week.
Other GOP senators have also been weighing reforms. Before the August recess, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky suggested eliminating certain procedural hurdles altogether. “One change would be to eliminate cloture motion on nominees and eliminate a motion to proceed and just have one vote and leave committee and have one vote,” Paul noted in July.
“And I think, really, the caucus is inclined to do something like that,” Paul added. “The push is going to come to shove if there is no negotiation and no settlement before that — I believe that the rules will change.”
Barrasso, while not endorsing specific proposals, made clear that the current system is untenable. For Republicans, the issue has become not merely about efficiency but about the Senate’s ability to function at all in the face of what they view as deliberate gridlock.
The dispute highlights a broader clash over the role of the minority in the Senate. While Democrats argue they are justified in resisting the president’s nominees, Republicans counter that a small group of lawmakers has effectively hijacked the confirmation process, leaving the executive branch short-staffed and unable to carry out its basic duties.
As Barrasso put it, the time for patience has run out. “Confirming even the most routine nominees is now a bitter fight,” he warned. For Republicans, changing the rules may now be the only way forward.
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