A rift is emerging among the incoming Senate Republican majority due to President-elect Donald Trump’s push for recess cabinet appointments.
Republicans can only afford to lose a handful of their 53 senators’ votes if they hope to enter a recess to allow Trump to appoint his Cabinet picks without Senate confirmation hearings. Multiple GOP senators are already signaling they are against recess appointments.
Breitbart News senior legal contributor Ken Klukowski and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission Ken Blackwell detailed how recess appointments work in a thorough article published Monday. A president can appoint cabinet members through recess appointments when the Senate is in recess for ten or more days.
To get to a ten-day recess, though, 51 senators have to agree to adjourn, or 50, and in that case, Vice President-elect JD Vance would serve as a tiebreaker. The Senate would also need consent from the GOP-led House of Representatives to adjourn for more than three days.
While Republicans need a simple majority, some GOP senators reportedly indicated they would not support going into a recess.
One such figure is Sen.-elect John Curtis (R-UT), who is replacing outgoing Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT).) Curtis’s chief of staff, Corey Norman, indicated to KSL-TV in a statement last week that Curtis wants confirmation hearings:
Senator-elect Curtis believes that every president is afforded a degree of deference to select his team and make nominations. He also firmly believes in and is committed to the Senate’s critical role to confirm or reject nominations based on information and insight from confirmation hearings.
The GOP could lose another critical vote in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who is stepping down from leadership at the end of this Congress.
Punchbowl News reported Monday that “McConnell signaled at a private event Sunday night that he opposes President-elect Donald Trump’s demand for recess appointments.”
Florida’s Voice News also reported Monday, citing a now-deleted tweet from a New Yorker reporter, that McConnell said Sunday that recess appointments would not happen.
However, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) responded to a tweet from Florida’s Voice News Assistant Director Eric Daughtry and declared, “Yes, there will be” recess appointments.
McConnell and Curtis, if their sentiments hold, could potentially bring the GOP down to 51 votes if they were against recess appointments, meaning Republicans could only afford one more senator going against a recess. Losing any more would mean the GOP has to make up the difference with Democrats’ votes, which is extremely unlikely to happen.
Senate Majority Leader-elect John Thune (R-SD) told Bret Baier on Fox News’s Special Report Thursday that “all options are on the table, including recess appointments.”
“Hopefully, it doesn’t get to that, but we’ll find out fairly quickly whether the Democrats want to play ball or not,” he added.
After Baier pointed out that establishment Republicans like Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) have “already raised concerns about” Robert F Kennedy Jr, Thune said that Senators who might have issues with particular nominees might not be keen on going into a recess:
It’s an option, but obviously… you have to have all Republicans vote to recess as well. So the same Republicans that you mentioned that might have a problem voting for someone under regular order probably also have a problem voting to put the Senate into recess. You have to have concurrence from the House. There’s a process, all this is a process.
But, I don’t think any of those things are necessarily off the table. I think we have to have all the options on the table, and these nominees deserve their day in court. They deserve a hearing, a confirmation hearing, an oppurtunity to be vetteed and the Senate will perform its consitutional role under advice and consent.
Thune emphasized to Bair earlier in the interview that Senate Republicans “are going to work with [Trump] to see that he gets his team installed as quickly as possible so that he can implement his agenda.”
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