Senate Republicans have voted inside their own conference to squeeze everything they can out of their final 54 days in the majority, adopting a resolution to maximize the time they have left and to confirm every Trump judicial nominee and every executive nominee the conference approves of. The vote came after Florida's two senators, Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, led a days-long push to keep the Senate in Washington working every day — through Thanksgiving and every weekend — until Democrats take control of the chamber on January 3.
Scott made his support for the leadership conditional on a plan. He refused to back Majority Leader John Thune for another term as Republican leader until Thune laid out exactly how the party would use the lame-duck session, telling reporters: “I don't want to put the cart before the horse. The first step is what do we want to accomplish?” His list was specific: balance the budget, pass a stock-trading ban for lawmakers, pass permitting reform, pass the National Defense Authorization Act and pass the SAVE America Act. “We need a plan to get the Republican agenda done,” Scott said. Over the weekend he had put the demand in blunter terms on Fox News: “We should be up there every day. Just stay every day, all through Christmas, all through Thanksgiving, all through New Year's, every day. Stay there, get things done.”
Scott, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Ted Budd of North Carolina, John Kennedy of Louisiana and Mike Lee of Utah also signed a letter demanding the conference meet and think through the midterm losses before holding its leadership elections, and Jim Banks of Indiana and Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania joined the call for a delay. The conference voted 31 to 15 to go ahead with the elections on schedule, and Thune was re-elected by acclamation — but only after the resolution to maximize the remaining weeks was adopted, and after Thune promised his colleagues they would try to do as much as they can in their final two months in the majority. “We're going to make the most of the time we've got,” Thune said afterwards.
Moody took the same demand to the Senate floor on Tuesday, the day before Veterans Day, and tied it to the Americans who never got to choose whether to work a holiday: “Tomorrow is Veterans Day; the greatest way we can honor our veterans is by working through Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and every weekend from now until the gavel changes hands to get legislation passed that will restore trust, ensure accountability, and deliver concrete actions toward addressing affordability. We owe it to those who fought for this country to ensure the American Dream endures.” On the floor she argued Republicans could work the rest of the week and the next two months to deliver on nominations, on accountability for the government and on rooting out fraud — and she named her two bills: the Stop Insider Trading Act and the SAVE America Act.
The SAVE America Act would require Americans to prove their citizenship when they register to vote and to show photo ID when they cast a ballot, so that only citizens vote in American elections. It passed the House in February but has stalled in the Senate, where Thune has refused to scrap the filibuster to pass voting legislation; Republicans are now weighing a third budget reconciliation bill — which needs only 51 votes — that could carry election-integrity measures and money to help states adopt them. The Affordability and Jobs Act is the bipartisan permitting bill, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, written by Republican Sens. Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee with Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich: it shortens federal permit timelines and the window for court challenges, makes data-center developers pay the electricity and grid costs of their facilities, and eases the siting of interstate transmission lines. The Senate voted 73 to 25 on Monday to advance it, and its backers say faster permits mean more energy built, more construction jobs and lower household power bills. The Stop Insider Trading Act is Moody's bill to prohibit insider trading by members of Congress — an end to lawmakers trading on what they learn in office, which polls show the vast majority of Americans want stopped.
Above all of it sit the judges. As of Tuesday there were 23 of President Trump's judicial nominees still waiting — 19 for district courts and four for the circuit courts — alongside nearly 100 executive-branch nominees. Republicans have confirmed 57 judges since Trump returned to office, and every one confirmed before January 3 is a seat Democrats cannot fill instead. Senators in the conference meeting were also pushing Thune to stay in session around the clock in the coming weeks to finish government funding and the defense bill alongside the confirmations.
For ordinary Americans, the 54 days are not an inside-Washington scheduling fight. The judges confirmed in them will rule for decades on the laws families live under. The permitting bill decides how fast energy projects, factories and transmission lines get built — and what shows up in a household's power bill and a worker's paycheck. The SAVE America Act decides whether every ballot counted in the next election belongs to a citizen. And the insider-trading ban decides whether the people writing the laws keep playing by the same rules as the people who have to live under them. Democrats won both chambers in the midterms — a Senate majority of about 54 seats — and everything on Scott and Moody's list that is not finished by January 3 will be decided by the other party instead.
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