By Kennedy Maize
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York has thrown a monkey wrench into the Trump administration’s plans to rapidly remold the federal government in his image through executive branch appointments.
Schumer on Saturday (Aug. 2) forced the Senate into its month-long August recess without acting on a long list of stalled Trump nominees and will slow-walk the nominations when the Senate returns to Washington in September.
The procedural move by Schumer may reflect a new attitude by congressional Democrats to flex what muscles they have against an aggressive White House, including forcing a showdown over future executive branch funding when Congress ends its summer recess.
As the Associated Press reported, Majority Leader John Thune was trying to clear out a clogged queue of stalled nominations before the recess through “unanimous consent,” where individual votes of nominations that head cleared committee approvals would not need to be subject to time-consuming individual votes. That’s been normal practice.
Schumer said, “We have never seen nominees as flawed, as compromised, as unqualified as we have right now.” Reluctant to keep the Senate in full session throughout the month, and threatening to try to change the rules when the Senate returns, Thune adjourned the Senate.
The Associated Press reported, “Trump has been pressuring senators to move quickly as Democrats blocked more nominees than usual this year, denying any fast unanimous consent votes and forcing roll calls on each one, a lengthy process that can take several days per nominee.”
While Thune wanted the Senate to approve Trump’s nominees, he didn’t want to give the president authority to make recess appointments while the Senate was out of session. He and Schumer agreed on a unanimous consent motion to keep the body nominally in session during August, preventing the White House from sidestepping the Senate. It passed without dissent.
The move by the Democratic minority leader has possible impacts on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Several Department of Energy nominations have also been stalled, but in many cases the nominees have been serving on temporary appointments pending Senate approval. For example, Ted Garrish, the administration’s nominee for assistance secretary for nuclear energy, whose nomination is stalled, has been serving at DOE since January as, according to his LinkedIn bio, “senior advisor to the secretary.”
At FERC, Republican Chairman Mark Christie, a Trump appointee whose term by law expired June 30, can stay on until the end of the year if he’s not officially replaced. He had planned to leave the commission by the end of the month. His departure without a replacement would leave the commission with only two members and unable to do most of its business. Christie told reporters last month, “I’m not leaving FERC with no quorum.”
Two Trump nominees to the commission are stalled as a result of the Schumer gambit.
At the NRC, a quite recent Trump nominee is stalled. That leaves the commission with a Republican chairman, David Wright, who managed to squeak through the nomination process before the Senate left town, and two Democratic commissioners.
At TVA, a long-running battle between the giant federal power agency and the White House, going back to Trump’s first term (2017-2021), has left the board of directors without a quorum since April, although day-to-day activity continues under the direction of new CEO Don Moul. Trump recently tried and failed to fire Moul. The lack of a quorum at TVA will continue.
Thune has said he will look at changing the rules on how nominations are handled when the Senate returns to work. He said, “I think that the last six months have demonstrated that this process, nominations is broken. And so I expect there will be some good robust conversations about that.”
That won’t be easy, as Democrats are unlikely to agree. Schumer responded that Thune’s move would be a “big mistake,” according to the AP, while raising the specter of the coming spending battle. Schumer added, “Donald Trump tried to bully us, go around us, threaten us, call us names, but he got nothing.”
For his part, Trump took to his personal social media platform Truth Social (which some opponents refer to as “Lies Social”) to respond. He wrote, “Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL!”
Most likely Schumer is in his apartment on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, his readers perched on his nose and a smile on his face.
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