WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has confirmed 48 of President Donald Trump’s nominees at once, voting for the first time under new rules to begin clearing a backlog of executive branch positions that had been delayed by Democrats.
Frustrated by the stalling tactics, Senate Republicans moved last week to make it easier to confirm large groups of lower-level, non-judicial nominations. Democrats had forced multiple votes on almost every one of Trump’s picks, infuriating the president and tying up the Senate floor.
The new rules allow Senate Republicans to move multiple nominees with a simple majority vote — a process that would have previously been blocked with just one objection. The rules don’t apply to judicial nominations or high-level Cabinet posts.
“Republicans have fixed a broken process,” Thune said ahead of the vote.
The Senate voted 51-47 to confirm the four dozen nominees. Thune said that those confirmed on Thursday had all received bipartisan votes in committee, including deputy secretaries for the Departments of Defense, Interior, Energy and others.
Among the confirmed are Jonathan Morrison, the new administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Kimberly Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece. Guilfoyle is a former California prosecutor and television news personality who led the fundraising for Trump’s 2020 campaign and was once engaged to Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
Yep. Republicans have the rabid following that they do because they accomplish tasks. Horrible, fucked up, stupid tasks that should never have even been tabled for discussion, but they get them done. 99% of Democrat messaging my entire lifetime has been “We’re gonna do [X]! Oh, wait, no, we can’t do [X] because we don’t have a supermajority. Shucks. Well, we’ll surely get 'em next time if you just vote for me again!” and people are, understandably, getting fucking tired of that. Especially when these same Dem voters watch every single conservative election cycle jam through abject bullshit without pushback. If they can get these things done then why can’t you? Why can Trump loot my 401k and Medicaid directly into his own pockets but Obama couldn’t enact universal health care? Why do we only ever ratchet toward the right?
Democrats have been chasing the mythical “centrist swing voter” for decades while voters have increasingly polarized into left vs right and the centrists have evaporated. Anyone who remains a centrist, now, isn’t even going to go vote because politics clearly do not play any part in their lives.
We now have the additional problem of the rabid MAGA crowd being so vehemently anti-Democrat that not only would they never vote blue no matter what they were promised, they’re statistically likely to go make attempts on the lives of Democratic officials or those running for office. So anyone who wants to run as a Democrat with an actual progressive platform are putting double the number of targets on themselves.
I think the only real way forward is a third party, one that can sidestep our red vs blue team sports mentality and say look, things are pretty bad for everyone right now. You don’t have to vote for a Democrat or a Republican to make things better. You can come vote for us instead, we’ll get this train back on track and you don’t have to go tell the boys that you voted for a Democrat
…But then our problem becomes making this third party actually electable, which has historically been a huge problem in America.
Honestly, the democratic brand is so tainted the the left really should embrace a strategy of running independents in solid red states. They’re receptive to a Bernie style message (tell them big Ag is trying to buy your farm, go big on right to repair so John Deere can’t screw you on parts, tell them that Medicare for all is actually good for small businesses that can’t compete on health care, etc), but after decades of right wing propaganda you can’t do anything under a democratic banner in those places (especially since the democratic party would put their thumb on the scale for the centrist guy in a primary).