Pedantic. Factionalized. Dog-tired. They’re all words that could describe the state of the U.S. Senate this week.
In combat by roll call vote, the GOP earned a small victory this week by delaying the confirmation of several judges, eventually striking a deal with the Democrats to prevent the seating of four liberal judges to circuit court spots.
But the tactics that ground the chamber to a halt came at a curious time: Right before Republicans retake the Senate majority. And if Democrats are to be believed, the GOP’s dilatory schemes might spark a prolonged war come next Congress, when Republicans try to pass their own bills and confirm their own nominees.
“You always have to be careful of what comes around, goes around,” Sen. Gary Peters told NOTUS.
Unlike the famous caning that took place in the old Senate chamber in 1856, a Senate fight these days is a death by a thousand votes. Literally. Altogether, 1,625 individual votes were cast on Monday alone — one vote for each senator’s separate thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
Wednesday was worse. Votes ended after midnight, when Democratic leadership agreed to pull the four circuit court judges in exchange for the expedient confirmation of around a dozen District Court judges.
“They’re requiring us to do every single step and take as long as we can. That’s their prerogative under the rules,” Sen. Chris Coons said. “It’s quite a bit taxing and frustrating.”
“We’re going to get as many judges done as we can, and they say, ‘Well, we’re going to make it painful for you,’” he added.
The week became a refresher course in parliamentary procedure: roll calls, mandatory quorums and forced votes on simple actions — like shifting between executive and legislative sessions. On Tuesday, tardy senators caused Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to make a motion to have the sergeant at arms “Request the Presence of Absent Senators,” which technically gives the sergeant at arms the authority to arrest senators to compel their attendance.
For most of the year, Schumer has moved his judicial confirmations through the Senate with the standard ease of a chamber that operates largely by unanimous consent. Republicans opposed the judicial nominations with their votes, but their defiance rarely reached the level of procedural warfare.
All this week, however, the GOP disrupted the unanimous consent agreements that the chamber typically operates under.
Current GOP Whip John Thune, recently elected the conference leader for the next Congress, reportedly engineered the plan to disrupt the confirmations.
“If Sen. Schumer thought Senate Republicans would just roll over and allow him to quickly confirm multiple Biden-appointed judges to lifetime jobs in the final weeks of the Democrat majority, he thought wrong,” Thune told Fox News Digital.
In the world’s greatest deliberative body — emphasis on deliberative — patience isn’t a virtue; it’s a state of existence.
So, even though several Democratic senators expressed acceptance — this is what we signed up for — their concession had a tinge of retribution to it, a certain we won’t forget flavor.
“I just know that there were a lot of times Leader McConnell warned us about things that came back to bite us,” Sen. Mark Warner said, grinning.
Democrats weren’t the only ones suffering through the spectacle. When Sen. Chuck Grassley passed by reporters Tuesday morning, he waved off their questions after Monday’s session went until 11:56 p.m.
“Ask me when I wake up,” Grassley said.
While there may have been some cranky GOP senators, most Republicans were on board.
“The strategy of delaying these votes is solely on the basis of denying a Democratic administration of getting their votes,” Sen. Thom Tillis said.
Sen. John Kennedy, a member of the Judiciary Committee, was even blunter as the clock ticked toward midnight on Monday. “We don’t like his nominees,” he said of Schumer.
Some Republicans complained about the GOP colleagues who failed to show up for the votes. Democrats passed several motions with 45 and 46 votes, and the disgruntled Republicans argued that, if everyone from their side had voted, they could have stopped Democrats from confirming those justices.
Conservative talking heads particularly took aim at the missing Republicans — most prominently, Vice President-elect JD Vance. After catching some friendly fire, Vance posted a since-deleted diatribe against a “War Room” staffer defending his absence by saying, basically, we would have lost anyway.
Vance appeared in the Senate during the latter half of the week and attended votes then, along with Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state. Even Sen. Mike Braun, whose colleagues considered whether he should resign from the Senate due to his excessive absences, showed up on Thursday.
While conservatives argued about attendance, Schumer pledged to keep going.
“We’ll keep working to confirm these lifetime appointments. It’s far too important, and we’re not going to let anything stand in our way,” Schumer said during a press conference on Tuesday. “Everyone should be prepared for another late night on Wednesday to vote on nominations to get as many judges done as possible.”
The marathon sessions weren’t all because of judges.
Before voting to confirm any nominees, the chamber slogged through multiple doomed resolutions. During a drawn-out vote on one proposal from Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders, departing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was overheard asking a floor staffer, “Can we get this thing to go a little faster?”
Just after 10 p.m., as her colleagues cycled through the chamber, Sinema had another question: “Can we engage in public shaming?”
The nominees definitely pushed the partisan envelope. Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin, both retiring independents who caucus with the Democrats, cast votes against multiple judges. Tillis, a Judiciary Committee member, said there was a reason Schumer saved these for a November vote.
“I have ‘No’ vote recommendations on all of them,” Tillis said. “Most of these are the more problematic ones that they’re trying to get done in the eleventh hour.”
With Tillis, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — three of the GOP conference’s more centrist Republicans — opposed, it wasn’t a stretch for leadership to get its more conservative senators on board with the delay tactics.
“These are not the judges they did early on,” Sen. James Lankford said. “These are the most controversial, most divisive, least balanced judges they’re bringing.”
The maneuver succeeded, in part. But it opened a door that the Democrats just might walk through in a couple months. While discussing the strategy, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse recalled Grassley’s shift away from the use of blue slip nominees in 2017, when he was chairman of Judiciary.
“I would think they learned a lesson when they broke up the circuit court blue slip, and we didn’t go back to it. So it wasn’t a one-way highway,” Whitehouse said. “There’s a similar lesson here.”
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Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.