Senate Republicans Don’t Deserve A Vacation Until They’ve Confirmed Trump’s Nominees
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by Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist.com, July 10, 2025
A day after Donald Trump assumed the Oval Office for the second time, Senate Majority Leader John Thune went to the Senate floor to pledge that he would do whatever it takes to confirm the returning president’s executive appointments.
“As I’ve repeatedly said, Senate Republicans are ready to work as long as needed to confirm President Trump’s nominees. Nights. Weekends. Recesses,” the South Dakota Republican wrote in an X post including his remarks.
As it turns out, that was a load of horse manure.
It is now July and there are currently more than 120 Trump nominees awaiting confirmation by the U.S. Senate. This exhaustive list includes pivotal appointments such as Matthew Lohmeier to be under secretary of the Air Force and Joe Kent to be director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
As The Federalist’s Rachel Bovard previously observed, while cabinet secretaries “are certainly important … everyone in Washington knows agencies’ sub-Cabinet-level officers and below are just as critical to executing the president’s agenda.” Having seen how the entrenched bureaucracy worked to sabotage Trump’s first term, Bovard noted, “most Republican voters now understand how critical these appointees are.”
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Unfortunately, Senate Republicans do not. As Americans have already witnessed, there are real consequences to the party’s unwillingness to rapidly confirm the president’s nominees.
When Pope Leo XIV was sworn in as the new head of the Catholic Church earlier this year, for example, the U.S. didn’t have an official ambassador to send to the Holy See. Why? Because Senate Republicans didn’t confirm Trump nominee Brian Burch to the position. They still haven’t.
None of that seems to matter to Thune and Senate GOP leadership, who have been more than willing to forgo five-day work weeks rather than fulfill the promise to voters made nearly six months ago. Despite possessing the power to hold the upper chamber in session and force votes on the president’s nominees until complete, Thune has opted to take his sweet time in getting these pivotal appointments across the finish line.
And the sluggish pace at which the majority leader and his feckless GOP counterparts are moving on confirmations is likely about to get even worse. Congress is weeks away from its August recess, a roughly month-long “break” in which members often return to their home states and both chambers are out of session.
Should Thune continue Senate confirmations at their current pace over the next few weeks and dismiss the upper chamber once the recess arrives, confirmation of Trump’s nominees will languish for an entire month (unless the president opts to temporarily fill them).
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Thune and the Senate GOP’s slow-as-molasses confirmation of Trump’s executive appointments is a choice. It’s a choice to be lazy, hapless do-nothings instead of acting like actual statesmen and fulfilling the job their voters elected them to do.
Thune and his colleagues are not going to act quickly on these nominations out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s going to require GOP voters to mount a serious pressure campaign (that includes help from Trump and the White House) to let them know that in no way, shape, or form should they be leaving town for vacation until the appointments are confirmed.
That is the mandate Senate Republicans were given, and they have an obligation to get it done.
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