WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has confirmed 48 of President Donald Trump’s nominees at once, voting for the first time under new rules to begin clearing a backlog of executive branch positions that had been delayed by Democrats.
Frustrated by the stalling tactics, Senate Republicans moved last week to make it easier to confirm large groups of lower-level, non-judicial nominations. Democrats had forced multiple votes on almost every one of Trump’s picks, infuriating the president and tying up the Senate floor.
The new rules allow Senate Republicans to move multiple nominees with a simple majority vote — a process that would have previously been blocked with just one objection. The rules don’t apply to judicial nominations or high-level Cabinet posts.
“Republicans have fixed a broken process,” Thune said ahead of the vote.
The Senate voted 51-47 to confirm the four dozen nominees. Thune said that those confirmed on Thursday had all received bipartisan votes in committee, including deputy secretaries for the Departments of Defense, Interior, Energy and others.
Among the confirmed are Jonathan Morrison, the new administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Kimberly Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece. Guilfoyle is a former California prosecutor and television news personality who led the fundraising for Trump’s 2020 campaign and was once engaged to Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
Democrats had forced multiple votes on almost every one of Trump’s picks, infuriating the president and tying up the Senate floor.
Yet the “Both sides” group will still continue to say the Dems aren’t even trying.
In this very thread people are blaming the Dems for not being fascists themselves under Biden and Obama.
No. You’re deeply mischaracterizing the situation.
The Democrats could have, at any point since 2008, responded to Republican obstructionism with this very same policy. It has been brutally apparent for well over two decades that the GOP was not negotiating in good faith, and would never again negotiate in good faith. The Democratic Party refused to even consider employing even the most basic precepts of game theory. They continued to negotiate with a bad faith actor in good faith, and were somehow constantly surprised when said bad faith actor acted in bad faith. That’s not politics. That’s rank idiocy.
This is not fascism, ending the fillibuster is not fascism.
The Democrats should have done so when they were in government to try and implement the things they were elected for.
America’s broken political system certainly had a role in it’s slide to fascism.
Fascism is when you don’t roll over for fascists in the name of norms, which the fascists don’t have to follow.
They’re fucking not. They could have done this exact fucking thing at any point since 2008, bUt tHAt wOuLD HavE beEn tOo DiVisiVE.
Do not pretend for a fucking second that the Democratic Party is in any way, shape or form competent. Do not pretend for a fucking second that the Democratic Party did anything but pave the way for this fascist regime with their ineptitude and greed, thus enabling the shattering of the American republic.
a very simple question: did it work?
all they have done so far are this kind of performative, petty, menial and ineffective resistances, yet on anything that has mattered, they capitulated.
please point me to anything effective they have done. so far the most hopeful thing i’ve seen is Zohran Mamdani getting the nomination, and the congressional Democrats still haven’t endorsed him yet.
yes it did work. They delayed his nominations for a long time as the minority party. they did the most effective thing possible in the situation.
Aww I’m so proud of them. Good boys and girls, those democrats.
certainly better than l33t keyboard warriors and all they are doing to take back the country.
Im betting the Dem votes to increase cop budgets helps the on the street resistance efforts…
why would it matter to those that don’t resist?
It matters to those who are.
Thune said that those confirmed on Thursday had all received bipartisan votes in committee
According to the article the Democrats are still helping Trump get these fascists appointed.
51-47. A few Dems is not the entire party.
Anyone down voting and arguing this point is an idiot without basic critical thinking skills.
If the few dems that voted to make it 51 was planned, then why didn’t they pass them with just enough to make 60 with the older rules?
If the party wanted, they could take those Dems off all committee assignments and cut them off of all party funds unless they work with the party. Instead the party continues to support these people. This tells us those in charge of the party, Chuck Schumer and co, support their actions.
if israel wasnt obvious already. The old guard is basically just the republicans lite.
Yep. The both sides people are sure helpful in all of this.
Obama had thousands of unconfirmed appointees because Republicans blocked them for his entire term
Sure. That’s because Democrats are political morons and spinless assholes.
Even now, spineless.
they also had 10 DINOS at the time to vote against them.
And party leadership should whip DINOS into shape.
Instead, the party consistently coddles and enables them.
It’s failure theater. They’re all still getting fucking paid.
Now they have so many more.
Pretty sure that headline is misleading and it was a non-binding resolution passed without a formal vote
Mitch mcconnel and gingrich were spearheading those blocks.
gingrich
Goddammit, you just reminded me that ghoul is still alive.
🤣 Twenty years of this shit. Twenty years of people saying “You can’t do anything in the Senate without 60 votes” back and forth at one another endlessly. Twenty. Fucking. Years. 😂
I never want to hear shit about how Clinton / Obama / Biden “tried hard” again. I never want to hear shit about “We can’t pack the courts, its unprecedented” or “This obviously qualified person is too radical to survive confirmation”. You liberals deserve what you fucking get. Damn shame the rest of us are getting dragged along behind your worthless asses.
Facists: Exist
DAMNED LIBRULS
???
DAMNED LIBRULS
For not taking action when they had the majorities.
Seems like a fair criticism.
I mean it’s 100% fair criticism, honestly. The part where it falls down for me is where the solution always seems to be “Don’t vote for Democrats!” (and then leaves the room, walking proudly)
Almost everyone in Washington is a piece of shit, although the Republicans are much worse. If you want to have another FDR, you have to have another several decades of labor movement before that, fighting for change from the bottom up. And then the political class is the last to come around, and they can lock in and extend some of the changes you fought for. “Democrats are POS” is mostly true. “Let’s get less engaged to politics / It doesn’t matter who wins the election” is a fucking horrifying reaction and plan to cope with that and make it better.
I’ve heard many people on Lemmy say that they’re not planning to engage with the electoral system until the Democrats get better on their own. All I can say to that strategy is, better start looking around for where to move to that’ll give you the best shot at having a pretty comfortable ICE facility to call home going forward. And if you identify as any kind of anarchist / Marxist / anything like that, if you are at all engaged with any kind of counterculture or activism and you’re still in the US, you should probably be making plans to leave, because for you it will probably be much much worse.
They expect Democrats to cater to people who don’t bother to vote because nothing is ever good enough.
“Bold strategy Cotton. We’ll see how it works out for them.”
Considering the Democrats are a minority in every single branch of government, I’d say its a bold strategy on their part to continually ignore their own base in favor of the Republican base.
The base that doesn’t vote for them?
Correct, the republican base does not and has never voted for a democratic candidate in meaningful numbers. However, trying to be republican-lite does a great job of decreasing turnout with your own base.
Bold but a cash cow
There’s that whole thing about everything in the US taking this horrifying downwards turn right around 1970, by all these different metrics, and there’s not really an obvious reason for it. I actually have one speculative theory on that: I think that in the 1968 Democratic convention, the Chicago cops beat the fuck out of a lot of the most passionate and engaged leftist activists the country had out in the street, and the lesson they took away from that (sorta reasonably, even though the Chicago cops certainly were not Democrats) was “fuck the whole political system then, I don’t care, I’m out and fuck you.” McGovern suffered his absolutely heartbreaking shutout in 1972, and the Democrats just stopped winning elections completely for the next 20 years, and eventually they learned their lesson and became Republicans. We went from JFK and LBJ to Clinton, and the new era of 1990s / 2000s horrors was born with no left representation anywhere in Washington.
So yeah, I agree with you. There’s not really any reason to think that anyone in Washington would react to the electoral disengagement of the left by moving any direction other than right, and I think there is a good argument for a strong precedent of them moving far right and the whole country getting fucked over a barrel up to and including the present day because of it.
Clinton only won in 92 because Ross Perot split the vote. Obama (and biden) won because people thought they were going to help them, and were further disaffected when they turned out to be republican-lite. You can’t pretend dems moving right does anything but further disaffect their base. You have to really really loath your base to lose against a party as malicious and incompetent as the republicans.
Never change guys
Never change
Damnit we should have used the gun first!
Fair, and pointless.
It’s not pointless. If we all complain when conservatives flush the rules down the toilet and kick open Pandora’s box, then do nothing when liberals lick their corporate donors’ toes while fretting over the propriety of the tiniest changes, then the Overton window keeps moving right and we’re all fucked.
The original complaint is absolutely pointless. It’s bitching about what happened literal decades ago.
Murc’s Law strikes again.
I mean, I don’t think you will have to ever hear it again to be honest. We’re headed into truly uncharted waters. By spring next year it’s hard to say what of our political system will even be recognizable.
It’s not uncharted.
The senate structurally favors republicans. It’s to the left’s advantage for it to be slow and inefficient. Now that that’s no longer the case it just means more than ever we need a movement with autonomous power that isn’t subjugated to a system that is designed to disenfranchise us.
It doesn’t really matter now. There won’t be any more elections, and the laws dont matter.
There won’t be any more elections
We’ve got two gubernatorial races and a whole mess of municipal races coming in November. So that remains to be seen.
But when see front-runners for primaries coddling up to fascism all up and down the Dem slate, it does not fill me with optimism for the future.
It makes me sick. I don’t want to leave the country, but I might be leaving the country.
Did that almost a year ago, only thing I miss is Waffle House (I never actually liked waffle house, but having it available at 2AM was comforting) and some friends who are still working on getting out.
Is there a list of countries its easy for americans to move to?
It varies massively between individual and financial circumstances, but the American passport is still very strong.
More of Murc’s Law, I see.
They don’t call’m “Reactionary” for nothin
We’re maybe a week away from the enabling act
The Enabling Act allowed the Reich government to issue laws without the consent of Germany’s parliament, laying the foundation for the complete Nazification of German society.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-enabling-act
I wanted to reply to numerous comments, but I’ll just do it here. The people aggrieved that democrats/liberals/the left didn’t do more are not wrong for being upset, even very upset. Things are generally better for everyone, in recent history, under left-side leadership. But our representatives have been beset by corporate capture since the 80s/90s so by my estimation politics has been a performative art for my entire lifetime. Still anyone with their head above water knows you’ve got better quality of life under democrats, even if they are deceptive or corrupt.
The system needs replacement. It has been captured whole by multi-national industry, corporations, investment interests, and billionaires. It is currently being bent and corrupted to the point of no return. Even if democrats work for us, they only give us so much before bending for their donor money. I’ve always had this vague notion that for even the best intentioned, there’s only so far you can climb the ladder of politics before you refuse a bribe, or lobbying money, and they just boot your ass. Or blacklist you, or whatever, you just get locked out. I dunno how to end this, except to say that the whole world needs a massive paradigm shift, and it just doesn’t look like we gettin it.
All Politicians Are Bastards
I was told that this was impossible to do when Dems were in power, because “The Reich wing might do it”…
Democrats will pull every dirty trick in the book
When a leftist is about to win.
Breaking News: Three Supreme Court Justices dies under mysterious circumstances, meanwhile trump’s three Supreme Court Justice Nominees approved within 2 hours.
The Nazis are grabbing power faster and faster every day
The country is already lost the real question is why has there been no coup yet. Very telling on Democrats and their ability to talk themselves into complacency.
What are they waiting for? Republicans to yell “lol we are fascist”? But we know Democrats will then go “oh but they’re just saying it we need conclusive actions so we can write another stern letter.”
America is a failed state. Let me hear it from everyone in the back.
The Democrats don’t care as long as their donors are happy.
And the donors are playing both sides.
See: Disney
they still believe there are going to be legitimate elections in the future. they are delusional.
But Trump says they’re legitimate and Democrats say nothing conclusively shows they were rigged and wrote a stern letter! Everything is fine people!
There’s a day in early November that I’m trying to remember.
Count me in
of course they gave kimberly gargoyle a position.
I will never be able to think of her any other way than shouting a full speech during the 2020 RNC.
“Do not let the Democrats make you believe you’re not good enough! Manifest! Fly me to the moon with that SpaceX cocaine! 🚀 Gimme gimme gimme!”
there’s only one way you can be giving a speech that is that shouty and not immediately stop and that’s if they’ve turned off your monitors. sound guy did her dirty, which means she fucked with the recording crew far worse than they usually get.
Befitting username
Which is the distraction?
This? Or the Epstein file?That’s fucking terrifying. So 48 more cult members with no qualifications and no willingness to work with Democrats in any way.
This definitely won’t hurt Americans even more…
Guilfoyle was also married to Gavin Newsom but they don’t tell you about THAT, do they.
seems a lot less relevant
It was just amusing that they had a blurb about Guilfoyle’s dating history in the article, but didn’t mention her marriage. Anyway, I wouln’t worry. The Senate Parliamentarian will put a stop to this outrage, I’m sure! /s
and formally engaged to donald jr. SHe jumps in bed with whoever gives her a lavish lifestyle.
Well I wasn’t as much trying to cast aspersions on Guilfoyle, as point at an element of similarity beween Newsom and Donald Jr.
Yeah well I made a new rule that says they can’t do that. Your move now, senators.
The Senate is now officially playing Calvinball.
It’s been a day or two since Ive heard that term. Brings back better days.
