Senate Republicans pushed through committee two of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees on Wednesday morning, reacting angrily to Democratic stalling tactics to disrupt a series of confirmation hearings the day before.
In a rare move likely to further stoke partisan tensions, Senate Finance Commitee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suspended his committee’s rules to advance Steven Mnuchin as Treasury secretary and Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) as secretary of Health and Human Services. Their nominations now head to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote, though it’s unclear when that will occur.
And by about 10:45 Wednesday morning, Senate Democrats also had not shown up at an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing to consider Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
“I hope this is not the new normal, because we cannot afford the EPA to go without an administrator,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), as an aide held a chart showing how quickly then-President Barack Obama’s nominees had been confirmed. “This amounts to nothing more than political theater at the expense of working on issues that we care about.”
There is little Democrats they can do to prevent final confirmation of any of Trump’s picks because the GOP needs only 50 votes to approve them in the full Senate and there are 52 Republican senators.
In a sign of their limited power, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted, 11 to 9, on a party-line vote with Democrats all present, to advance Sen. Jeff Sessions’s (R-Ala.) nomination to become attorney general. A confirmation hearing for Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) to lead the Office of Management and Budget was delayed on Wednesday.
The full Senate is also scheduled to vote Wednesday on final confirmation of Rex Tillerson as scretary of state.
[Fractured U.S. Senate awaits Trump’s Supreme Court pick]
So far, five high-ranking Trump nominees have been approved by the full Senate: Elaine Chao as Transportation secretary and John Kelly and Gen. James Mattis at the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon; Mike Pompeo to lead the CIA; and Nikki Haley to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Elaine Chao as Transportation secretary.
The Democratic moves — and Republican reaction — mark a dramatic escalation in partisan tensions on Capitol Hill following Trump’s decision over the weekend to issue an executive order barring travel to the United States from those who live in seven Muslim-majority countries. Some Democrats were also angered by the president’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night, arguing that Republicans cannot expect them to swiftly approve the selection after their blockade of Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, before the election.
In a sign of a new level of toxicity, Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was among six members of the Democratic caucus who voted against her. Chao, who is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), is the first transportation secretary ever to earn “no” votes, according to a C-SPAN review of Senate records.
But Republicans are clearly frustrated by the Democratic stalling tactics and are fighting back.
In the Finance Committee, Hatch explained in a statement that although panel rules said their must be a quorum of members for all committee business — including a member from each party — those rules can be suspended at any time. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) moved to suspend the rules regarding these nominees specifically, and all rules that apply to them going forward. Hatch said the rare measure was approved by the Senate parliamentarian.
Democrats were told Wednesday morning that the committee would reconvene but they were not given any indication that Hatch planned to alter the rules to approve the nominees, according to a spokesman for them.
“We took some unprecedented actions today due to the unprecedented obstruction on the part of our colleagues,” Hatch said in a statement. “Republicans on this committee showed up to do our jobs. Yesterday, rather than accept anything less than their desired outcome, our Democrat colleagues chose to cower in the hallway and hold a press conference.”
Hatch vowed this would not be the end of the story.
“Needless to say, this discussion isn’t over. I intend to get the committee back to where it once was, and I will use every tool at my disposal, procedural or otherwise, to make sure this doesn’t become the new normal for the Senate Finance Committee.”
Lead Finance Committee Democrat Ron Wyden (Ore.) assaulted the Republican actions to approve Mnuchin and Price without Democrats present.
“Today, for the 1st time in history, Senate Finance Cmte broke the rules to push through, on a partisan basis, 2 nominees who misled the Cmte,” Wyden tweeted.
He complained that Mnuchin had misled the committee by initially misstated his personal wealth on a financial disclosure form, and he misstated under oath how OneWest Bank, a bank he led as chairman and chief executive officer, scrutinized mortgage documents. And he pointed to a series of discounted stock buys Price made in a health care company, first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Democrats began their protests on the Hill Tuesday, when they walked out of the scheduled committee votes and used other commitee rules to slow consideration of Sessions as attorney general.
“It is time to get over the fact that they lost the election,” McConnell said. “The president is entitled to have his Cabinet appointments considered. None of this is going to lead to a different outcome.”
Democratic opposition grew after the announcement this weekend of Trump’s ban on travelers from what he said were dangerous countries. They are echoing growing liberal anger in the streets by exhausting every procedural mechanism at their disposal to delay the nominees — even if it still results in Trump’s nominees taking office.
“Democrats are going to keep fighting back,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). “We are going to stand with people across the country. And we will keep pushing Republicans to put country above party, and stand with us.”
That stance was met with praise from liberal activists, labor unions and constituents, who have been pressuring Democrats to mount more resistance to Trump.
“We’re seeing someone who came into office with a historic popular vote loss come in and push a radical, unconstitutional agenda,” said Kurt Walters, the campaign director of the transparency group Demand Progress. “Yes, radical and bold tactics are what senators should be using in response.”
The protests began Tuesday with a delay on the vote to approve Sessions as attorney general after Trump fired acting attorney general Sally Yates for refusing to enforce Trump’s executive order.
On Tuesday, Democrats said they were concerned that Sessions would never similarly defy Trump in the face of a potentially unconstitutional act. Then they invoked an arcane rule to block the committee from holding a roll-call vote on the nomination, forcing Republicans to postpone the vote until Wednesday.
In a nearby hearing room, the Senate Finance Committee convened to vote on Treasury secretary-designate Mnuchin and Price. Democrats boycotted that meeting entirely, denying Republicans a necessary quorum and forcing them to reschedule both votes.
They had less success delaying confirmations elsewhere. They tried once again to stall a committee vote to advance Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, but Republicans prevailed on a party-line vote despite new revelations that her written responses to hundreds of questions appeared to include passages from uncited sources.
Meanwhile, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved the nominations of former Texas governor Rick Perry to be energy secretary and Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) to be interior secretary — both with bipartisan majorities, sending them to the full Senate for final up-or-down votes.
Most of the drama Tuesday unfolded along a fluorescent-lit hallway on the second floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.
Hatch sat at the dais with just three other Republican senators at the start of his hearing to consider Mnuchin and Price. Having just come from the Judiciary Committee where Sessions’s nomination was being stalled, Hatch told his colleagues, “Jeff Sessions isn’t treated much better than these fellas are.”
“Some of this is just because they don’t like the president,” Hatch said, later adding that Democrats “ought to stop posturing and acting like idiots.”
Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) agreed. “I think this is unconscionable,” he said.
“We did not inflict this kind of obstructionism on President Obama,” added Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), the only other senator in the room. He added that the Democrats were committing “a completely unprecedented level of obstruction. This is not what the American people expect of the United States Senate.”
In fact, in 2013, Republicans similarly boycotted a Senate committee’s vote on Gina McCarthy to serve as former president Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator. Senators said at the time that she had refused to answer their questions about transparency in the agency. Republicans did it again that year to one of Obama’s nominees to serve as a deputy secretary of homeland security. And throughout 2016, they blocked a hearing for Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.
In a series of interviews on Monday, Schumer threatened to jam the Senate calendar if Trump did not revoke his travel order or if Republicans did not allow a vote on legislation that would rescind it.
“Senate Democrats, we’re the accountability,” Schumer boasted in an interview with Spanish-language network Univision.
On Tuesday, shortly before the Finance Committee hearing began, committee Democrats huddled in the office of lead Democrat Ron Wyden (Ore.) and agreed to boycott the meeting.
“In some ways, we’re doing President Trump a favor,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said. “If these nominees had been confirmed, and then these stories broke about how they lied, how they made money on foreclosures, how they made money off of sketchy health-care stock trades, this would have been a major scandal for the administration. Now it’s just a problem we can fix.”
Hatch, the longest-serving Republican senator, later marveled at having to rush back and forth between three contentious hearings.
“I lost some weight here today,” he quipped.