Senate Confirms 48 Trump Nominees in "Nuclear" Move

The U.S. Senate on Sept. 18 voted in one step to confirm 48 nominations made by President Donald Trump to various executive branch agencies.

The move came a week after the chamber adopted a new rule allowing Trump’s nominees to be confirmed more quickly.

The nominations included several national security-related positions. They included former U.S. Rep. Brandon Williams (R-N.Y.) to be undersecretary of energy for nuclear security and head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Michael Cadenazzi to be assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy, and Katherine Sutton to be assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy.

The list also included nominations for Callista Gingrich, wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), to be ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. and ex-wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, to be ambassador to Greece.

The nominations were approved by a vote of 51–47. Some of the nominations had been pending since Jan. 20, the day Trump took office, because Senate Democrats denied unanimous consent to procedural measures needed to advance them quickly.

“The longtime practice of the Senate was expeditious confirmation of presidential nominations, often in blocks, using the procedural mechanism of voice vote or unanimous consent ... over the years, Democrats have steadily eroded that bipartisan tradition,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said on the Senate floor on Sept. 11.

“We are more than seven months into President Trump’s current term, and the Senate has yet to confirm one single civilian nominee by unanimous consent or voice vote.”

Democrats have said that they denied unanimous consent to proceed because of concerns about the qualifications and loyalties of nominees. They demanded more scrutiny of each nominee before a final vote.

“Historically bad nominees deserve historic levels of scrutiny. We have never seen nominees as flawed, as compromised, as unqualified as Trump’s,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote on social media on Aug. 2.

The blocking of nominations has been a controversy in the Senate for the past several months.

In order to consider the 48 nominations together, or “en bloc,” the Senate had to pass a resolution and change its rules to allow for the measure. Senate rules may be changed by voting to overrule the judgment of the presiding officer, who rules points in and out of order according to precedent, as was done in the case of this resolution.

That resolution, known as the “nuclear option” in media parlance, was passed by the Senate on Sept. 15. Now that the Senate has granted “advice and consent” to the nominations, the nominees may be commissioned by the president and sworn into office.