2 days ago
I Watched the Senate Break Down. Here's How to Fix It.
But any senator could still object and delay the process, placing a hold on a nominee and extracting concessions in exchange for lifting it. While presidents never liked horse-trading over personnel, they understood the game. During the Reagan administration, Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts lifted his eight-month hold only after surgeon general nominee C. Everett Koop promised to keep his personal religious views out of public health policy. In the 1990s, Sen. Jesse Helms of South Carolina brought the entire Foreign Relations Committee to a standstill until the Bill Clinton administration relented on an up-or-down vote on his plan to reorganize the State Department. Holds were powerful — wielded strategically — but never for routine obstruction.
That balance began to unravel during the Obama years, when Republicans filibustered judicial picks to the D.C. Circuit, demanding a roll-call vote and a 60-vote threshold for confirmation. In 2013, Democrats responded by invoking the so-called 'nuclear option,' eliminating the 60-vote threshold for most executive branch and judicial nominees, thus making it easier to confirm nominees with only one party's support. In response to Democrat-orchestrated slowdowns during Trump's first term, Republicans expanded the same rule to include Supreme Court nominees and also cut debate time for most others from 30 hours to two hours to make it easier to get their own nominees through. By the end of the first Trump administration, a majority of votes taken in the Senate, 64 percent, were nominations.
At the outset of Biden's term, it was clear that with the slimmest of Democratic majorities, we couldn't vote through 1,200 confirmed positions one by one. There wasn't enough floor time, not even close. We had to reawaken Washington's dormant dealmaking culture.
That meant negotiating, and it started at the top. Sen. Mitch McConnell didn't support most of our agenda. But as Republican minority leader at the time, he cared deeply about protecting the Senate's prerogatives, especially when it came to Republican-designated seats on independent boards and commissions. While that norm had already started to erode during Trump's first term, we stuck to it. We put forward McConnell's picks. In return, he helped move ours.
It wasn't always popular in the West Wing. Some White House colleagues bristled at the idea of naming Republicans who weren't aligned with Biden's policies. But we weren't handing out favors. We were honoring an old Senate practice to keep the confirmations moving.
With an agreement in hand, we revived the art of pairing nominees: bundling a Democrat and a Republican as a negotiated package. Tying their fates together gave both sides something to gain, helping us expedite confirmations at regulators like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Pairing was the easy part. The trickier work was getting through the individual holds that came from all corners of the Senate. Some members were repeat players. Sometimes they had real concerns. Often, they didn't. Our job was to find out what they wanted anyway.
