Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) says that putting the Senate into an extended recess to allow President Trump to make recess appointments to clear the backlog of his pending nominees is an option that’s “on the table.”
Thune pushed back on the idea of putting the Senate into an extended recess at the start of the year to allow Trump to fill his Cabinet without having to go through the time-consuming confirmation process.
Now, Thune isn’t ruling out the idea of opening the way for recess appointments as the Senate faces a huge backlog of 161 nominees, mostly lower-level positions that in past years would have been filled by voice votes or unanimous consent agreements on the floor.
“I think everything is on the table,” Thune told reporters, who said that other options such as rules reform “make more sense.”
“Fixing the rules, not just for now, but for the long term would be a better solution for it. But at this point right now, I wouldn’t say we’re taking any options off the table,” he said.
Some Republicans are making the argument within the GOP conference that putting the Senate into an extended recess, which would allow Trump to swiftly fill open positions with recess appointments, is the best path forward.
Proponents of going the route of recess appointments argue that there are so many nominees currently pending that it would take too long to reach consensus on a rules change to speed up confirmations, and that the rules reform would likely be too modest to have much of an immediate impact on the backlog.
“Whatever it takes,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said of adjourning the Senate for several weeks to allow Trump to make recess appointments.
“This is so completely broken, so out of control,” he said of the backlog of nominees.
There are several obstacles to putting the Senate into an extended recess.
The first is that Thune would need to get at least 50 Republicans to vote for the recess, and already two GOP senators have raised concerns about doing that — Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).
Thune could afford no more than three defections from his conference on recess appointments.
The second obstacle is that the House would also have to agree to a longer-term adjournment resolution to opt out of pro forma sessions that block the president from making recess appointments.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) hasn’t given any indication that he plans to call his members back to Washington to approve an adjournment resolution, but that could change if the Senate decides to set the stage for Trump to make recess appointments.
