How far can he go to get his nominees confirmed?

What’s on the table if he decides not to confirm a Republican Majority Leader in the Senate: The murky waters surrounding the confirmation fight

“With Trump, there’s always the question of is he raising the stakes as a way of shifting the negotiation onto more favorable grounds, without really expecting to have to go through with everything he’s saying,” Wallach said.

Ahead of the Senate Republican leader election this week, Trump said that a majority leader ” must agree” to allow for recess appointments if his nominees stall out during the confirmation process. The three candidates in the leader race quickly agreed it would be an option, and the winner, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., reiterated publicly on Thursday that “all options are on the table.”

Technically, yes. Senate Democrats could make the process difficult through procedural maneuvers. But conceivably, the GOP-controlled Senate could find a way to adjourn for the necessary 10 or more days. That would allow Trump to do what he wants.

Procedures and constitutionality is unrelated to the messaging fight Trump could wage from the White House. There are all the murky procedural waters surrounding this fight, which underscores how much Trump seems primed for this fight.

The Senate is ignoring you if you pass the bill and then send it to them, Wallner said. “The House can’t force the Senate into a state of disagreement. The Senate can act on what the House sends them.

If there was a state of disagreement, the House would need to pass an adjournment resolution and send it to the Senate, the Senate would have to amend the bill and the House would have to agree with the changes.

James Wallner is senior fellow at R Street, a think tank that focuses on public policy through limited government. “This isn’t going to happen.”

The Senate is in a state of disagreement: A resolution that does not dissolve the Senate, or what does it tell us about the American Parliament?

Legislative experts do not agree on what constitutes a formal disagreement between chambers. Some told NPR the Senate would need to send a formal resolution back to the House — others said the mere fact that whatever House adjournment resolution gets sent to the Senate doesn’t pass the Senate is indication that there’s disagreement.

It’s not something that has happened before in the history of the United States. It kind of smacks of the model America was trying to dismantle 250 years ago, right? The idea that the parliament can be prorogued. If the members of one chamber murdered the president while he was trying to get them to back down it would be a very serious constitutional crisis.

So a president could adjourn Congress if there is disagreement between the two chambers and use that as a way to ram his nominees through. It’s something Trump previously threatened to do during his first term.

The chambers have to adjourn for longer than three days. The House and Senate are considered to be in a state of disagreement if one chamber adjourns while the other does not.

Republicans could try to get Democrats to cooperate, by staying longer or working on the weekends. The Senate stepped aside from one of their biggest responsibilities.

Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn, a former top party leader who ran for Senate majority leader, recently told reporters recess appointments are a kind of “fail safe” if Democrats were to block nominees.

Do Senators really have 50 votes to object to exercising advice and consent? You can do whatever you want. Our loyalty to you is so much more important to the rights we have as senators’,” Binder said.

It’s worth noting that it is rare for the Senate to vote down a Cabinet pick. Nominees at risk of failing to make it through the Senate process can withdraw before they reach the point of public failure.

Since that ruling, the Senate has stopped taking long breaks. To make sure a president can’t install someone without their input, the Senate has what’s called “pro forma” sessions. Little if any business is conducted while most of the Senate is away, and one senator comes to the chamber every few days to technically keep the body in session.

The president has the power to make recess appointments, which are limited-term appointments and can be made while the chamber is not in session.

President-elect Donald Trump is charting a course toward a major confrontation with the Senate over confirming his Cabinet nominees, which could provoke an unprecedented power struggle between the executive and legislative branches of government.

Trump has made clear he expects his party members to fall in line, and if they don’t, he has often found ways to get around them. Thune is respected by his colleagues and well liked by his GOP confreres. He worked hard and raised impressive sums of money to help his party seize back the majority this fall. Soon he will face a choice between Trump’s demands and the preferences of Republican senators who chose him as leader. When they coincide, it’s fine. When they don’t, Thune will need to find a compromise or choose sides.

But the true confrontation may not be between opposing parties. There are several GOP nominees that may have to contend with Republican resistance, including Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Senate Republicans will have to navigate fealty to a party leader who they say is responsible for the GOP getting unified government, and holding onto one of their most important job functions, if those nominees are approved.

“It does come off as a shot across the bow [from Trump],” said Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the center-right American Enterprise Institute. How do you make the legislators think about letting themselves be swept out of the way, and what kind of precedent does that set? The idea of the reward for winning the Senate is that we need to sit back and watch you do your thing, but I don’t think senators will go for that.

What do high-profile presidential nominees tell us about the Trump campaign and how they’ve been affected by the online fb-blogger scandal?

The presidential nominations are referred to relevant committees. For instance, the attorney general is referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Nominees that aren’t referred unless requested are sometimes the exception, but most are in the process of vetting.

Committees assemble information about nominees before, or sometimes instead of, a hearing. This is where senators look at the qualifications, statements and experience of the nominees. For most Cabinet-level nominees, but especially high-profile nominations like secretaries of state and defense, a public confirmation hearing is common and expected by the Senate.

The committee report the nomination to the full Senate with a few options, but no action, or they can be favorably or unfavorably.

Thousands of executive nominations make their way through the Congress every year, with Cabinet-level positions getting a lot of media attention. The Senate doesn’t have time to approve them all individually, so it can approve “en bloc”, essentially a bulk approval.

Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University, said that limitation isn’t a bad thing for the Trump administration.

If incumbents are confident that they can beat back a primary challenge, the primary fights drain their campaign resources. They put incumbents in a position of having to take a harder partisan line. They give the president of the same party a lot of leverage. It had been that way for a long time before Trump’s personality was involved.

Not everyone in the Republican Party would be upset that their senator stood up to Trump. If Republicans want to invite a primary challenger in their next election, they will have to oppose Trump on anything notable in the next two years.

Republican officeholders know Trump’s voters are largely their voters. They know that if they run again they will need these votes in the general election and quite possibly in a Republican primary as well.

Now that Trump has won another election and carried the popular vote as well as his largest share of the Electoral College, they are most likely concerned about his voters.

Trump has a reputation for his bluster and personality. His supporters can amplify the effects of the internet on them. But as unpleasant as such a flaming must be, at least a few senators have shown they can withstand a bit of heat.

There’s a chance that Senate Republicans won’t show up to vote against any of these nominees in the 119th Congress. They may make their objections known in a variety of ways, including off-the-record comments. Unless they band together to make a unified stance in the Senate, it won’t matter. There could be huge ramifications for the few GOP senators who held out.

If there were just one controversial nominee taking all the heat, a withdrawal of a defeat in committee or on the floor might seem likely — or even probable.

There have been controversial choices in the past, but these choices seemed highly likely to antagonize the agencies they would be overseeing. Indeed, that appeared to be the intent.

A Senator’s View of Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Candidate: Tulsi Gabbard, a former Air Force veteran, and the legacy of her father

And then, to top off a week of show stoppers, Trump announced that the anti-vaccine activist and former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be his secretary of Health and Human Services Department. That gives him responsibility for the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and countless programs providing medical care and protecting the public. Trump said he and Kennedy would “make America safe and healthy again.”

Gaetz has a lot of fans in the Senate and a lot of critics. If you get all your news from TV, you might well think his nomination is the biggest story since, well, the last Trump-linked scandal or outrage. Moderate senators note the importance of the Senate’s advise and consent process.

Here’s what could be: Gabbard has no senior military or national security experience and acquired a reputation as a defender of Vladimir Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which she blamed on the hostile posture of President Biden and the NATO alliance toward Russia. Commentators, including some conservatives, have wondered aloud just how deep Gabbard’s sympathy with Putin’s positions might go.

Consider Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s choice as the new director of national intelligence. Another veteran is critical of “forever wars.” She was also briefly a Democratic member of the House before becoming a Trump fan. But all that would be little or no problem for the senators.

Pete Hegseth, an Army veteran known for his commentary on Fox News, was named the secretary of defense. Although a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan missions, he does not have the background that senators have come to expect of someone appointed to head up the Department of Defense. Hegshe has made comments about the firing of current generals and the uniformed leadership of the armed services. Some outside observers found it hard to believe Trump was serious about the choice, suggesting the president-elect was mostly giving the Pentagon a shot across the bow.

The week got going with the news that Trump wanted a colleague to serve as his secretary of state. If Rubio is as reliable as he is, Senators will not object to having one of their own elevate to Cabinet status.

That experience led Bolton to write a scathing critique of Trump in 2020. This week he called Trump picking Tulsi Gabbard to serve as his director of national intelligence (DNI) “the worst Cabinet-appointment in history.”

President George W. Bush used it to install John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2005 (circumventing a Senate committee that included senior Democrat Joe Biden and a first-term member named Barack Obama.) Bolton did serve in the job on that basis and has continued his long-running career as a leading hawk on military and foreign policy. During his first term, he was the national security adviser to Trump.

That is an understatement as at least four of Trump’s second-term picks to date could qualify as a “problem nominee.” Any one of them could be the focus of negative media coverage and the cause of enormous discomfort for Republican senators who must vote to confirm.

At this point, the newly elected Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota is hedging his bets. “None of this is going to be easy,” he said Thursday.

The nominees for several key Cabinet posts in the new administration of President-elect Donald Trump caught officials in Washington off guard this week and ignited a firestorm of criticism — not all of it from Democrats.