Three military services are now without Senate-confirmed heads for the first time in history, as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) holds up the confirmations of more than 300 senior military officers …
Because how the system was designed it was never an issue before. It’s a committee and was always bipartisan. He made it political and extremely partisan. They can remove him though anytime.
Without unanimous consent the process takes a lot longer. The current backlog of 300 nominations could be cleared in 1 vote with unanimous consent. Without that it’s much slower. I don’t know how slow, but I think each nomination ends up requiring multiple procedural votes like “when are we voting on this?” and so on.
Even if each individual vote were to take the 3ish hours Tuberville claims, that’s still 900 hours - over 100 working days / 20+ weeks of business just to clear this logjam he’s created.
As I understand it, the Senate’s normal rules require each appointment to be discussed individually in the Senate. But the armed forces are so big now that they are typically discussed in committee at the same time. But since they haven’t changed the actual rule yet, in order to batch all the nominations together they need unanimous consent of all senators.
So, Coach is using that as a weapon to get what he wants. Yeah, blame him if you want, but we should also blame the culture in the Senate where they continually rely on unanimous consent to get things done, rather than take the time to fix underlying rules.
How can 1 Senator hold up these military appointments?
He’s just the tip of the spear. GOP Senate Leadership could change this, but they haven’t.
Less “tip of the spear”, more “tip of the impacted bowel”. We’ll only have relief when he’s dislodged and regular movements can resume.
Because how the system was designed it was never an issue before. It’s a committee and was always bipartisan. He made it political and extremely partisan. They can remove him though anytime.
Without unanimous consent the process takes a lot longer. The current backlog of 300 nominations could be cleared in 1 vote with unanimous consent. Without that it’s much slower. I don’t know how slow, but I think each nomination ends up requiring multiple procedural votes like “when are we voting on this?” and so on.
Even if each individual vote were to take the 3ish hours Tuberville claims, that’s still 900 hours - over 100 working days / 20+ weeks of business just to clear this logjam he’s created.
As I understand it, the Senate’s normal rules require each appointment to be discussed individually in the Senate. But the armed forces are so big now that they are typically discussed in committee at the same time. But since they haven’t changed the actual rule yet, in order to batch all the nominations together they need unanimous consent of all senators.
So, Coach is using that as a weapon to get what he wants. Yeah, blame him if you want, but we should also blame the culture in the Senate where they continually rely on unanimous consent to get things done, rather than take the time to fix underlying rules.