Senate Leader John Thune is sending the Senate home for the week with more than 150 of President Trump's nominees still unconfirmed — and with barely two months left of the Republican majority before Democrats take over the Senate in January.
The charge from his critics is blunt: that the Senate is going home early after getting hardly anything done this week, that Thune spent his time getting himself elected leader of the incoming minority and bad-mouthing the Americans who are angry, and that the nominations backlog sat untouched while the calendar ran down on the majority. Thune has heard the anger — he says so himself.
On Bret Baier's Fox News programme, the host put the public mood to him directly, and the leader answered in his own words:
Baier: "People are angry."
Thune: "Sure. Yeah."
Baier: "Really angry. Of course they are. Some of them are really angry at you."
Thune: "Yeah. Well, and they have been for a long time, and that's been going on for some time. This isn't new. This is kind of a daily experience for me, at least in the online world."
The anger, in other words, is not news to him — and neither, he argues, is a president's frustration with the Senate. Thune said he has talked to President Trump, who is frustrated with the Senate, as every president is. Then he made the institutional case that sits underneath his whole defence of the chamber:
"The Senate is a hard place to do business," Thune said. "We have, you know, it's a deliberative body, it's a non-majoritarian body by design."
That is the heart of his defence: the Senate was built to be deliberative — to slow measures down, force debate and protect the minority's voice — so its pace is the design working as it was designed to work, not a leader failing to lead. On that argument, a backlog is what a non-majoritarian chamber produces when time is short and agreement is scarce, and no leader can simply order 150 nominations confirmed by willpower.
The pressure on him, though, is real, and it is coming from the top. On Monday, President Trump demanded on Truth Social that the lame-duck Senate confirm all 161 of his pending nominations, including 25 federal judges, before Democrats take over the Senate majority in January. It is against that demand that the Senate is now going home for the week, with the list still waiting.
For ordinary Americans, this is not an argument about Senate procedure for its own sake. Every unconfirmed nominee is a post left empty: a federal courtroom where cases wait longer for a judge, an agency desk where decisions on permits, benefits and enforcement sit unsigned. The majority doing the confirming was elected by voters to fill those posts, and it has an end date. Whether Thune's answer — that the Senate is slow because it was made to be slow — is enough for the people who sent that majority to Washington is the question that follows him into January.
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