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.
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