Senate Republicans rammed through the first procedural hurdle on their road to confirming nearly 100 of President Donald Trump’s nominees on Wednesday.
The move tees up a later vote on 97 of Trump’s picks and marks the third time Senate Republicans advanced a bloc of the president’s nominees since changing the confirmation rules in September.
The final vote to confirm the latest tranche of picks is expected next week. Once Republicans clear this latest package, they will have confirmed over 400 of Trump’s picks during the first year of his second term.
That benchmark would place him well ahead of former President Joe Biden, who at the same point in his presidency had 350 of his nominees confirmed.
Among the list of nominees are former Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, R-N.Y., to serve as inspector general at the Department of Labor, and two picks for the National Labor Relations Board, James Murphy and Scott Mayer, among several others across nearly every federal agency.
The inclusion of Murphy and Mayer in the package comes after Trump fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, a move that was ultimately found to be legal by the Supreme Court earlier this year.
It’s also Senate Republicans’ second attempt to move this package after Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., objected last week in a bid to derail the process.
Senate Republicans went nuclear and changed the rules surrounding the confirmation process in a bid to break through Senate Democrats’ monthslong blockade of Trump’s nominees and limited the scope to only sub-Cabinet-level positions that would be advanced through a simple, 50-vote majority.
But one of the nominees in the original package, Sara Carter, a former Fox News contributor whose legal name is Sara Bailey, was considered a ‘Level 1’ nominee, meaning she would hold a Cabinet-level position.
Trump tapped Carter in March to be his drug czar as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Carter’s inclusion in the package meant that if Republicans wanted to confirm the 87 other nominees and her, they would have to break the 60-vote filibuster threshold. That outcome was highly unlikely, given Senate Democrats’ near-universal disapproval of several of Trump’s picks and accusations that many were not qualified to serve in the positions they had been tapped to fill.
Senate Republicans took advantage of the opportunity, however, and moved instead to offer a new, more beefed-up package that added nine more nominees.