Editors at National Review Online support a shift in rules on Capitol Hill.
The rules of the Senate are an important storehouse of a great deliberative tradition, and they should not be lightly changed. But neither should they be wielded to exercise a power that the Senate doesn’t even need to possess and doesn’t currently use for any serious purpose aside from pointless delay.
Majority Leader John Thune is backing a plan to change the Senate’s rules for confirming executive branch nominees in order to allow for bloc voting on groups of nominees rather than time-consuming individual votes that permit the minority party to delay confirmations by a grinding war of attrition. The plan is a sound one, so long as its scope is appropriately limited to subordinate officials within the executive branch whose confirmations are required by statute rather than by the Constitution.
The Senate’s confirmation power is one of the most important responsibilities given to the upper chamber in the Constitution. Starting with Harry Reid’s use of the “nuclear option” to change the rules for appellate court nominees on a party-line basis in 2013, the filibuster has been gradually eliminated as a tool for the minority to block confirmations or judicial and executive branch nominees. That leaves two weapons for the minority. One is simply to refuse unanimous consent and force a laborious one-by-one floor process for each nominee. The other is the “blue slip,” by which senators are allowed to block a vote on nominees to be district judges or U.S. attorneys in their own state.
Thune isn’t proposing to eliminate the blue slip, which has many supporters in both parties. Nor, wisely, is he tampering with the legislative filibuster. But the refusal of unanimous consent has escalated in recent administrations and become routine this year, stranding hundreds of nominees.
