With the U.S. Senate set to break for August recess, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told The Daily Signal he is pushing for action on approximately 140 presidential nominees still awaiting confirmation.
While the Senate has confirmed more than twice as many nominees as it had at this point in the first Trump administration, Lee said he remains concerned about the pace. The nominees include ambassadors, U.S. attorneys, assistant secretaries, and undersecretaries. (Read a full transcript of Lee’s interview below.)
“We’ll never get caught up,” Lee said of the current pace of confirmations.
He added that “it’ll probably be April—perhaps late April—before we’re done with this slate of roughly 150 nominees. … By then, during that time, guess what’s going to happen? We’ll probably have another 200-plus nominees come out of committee between now and April.”
The backlog, Lee told The Daily Signal, not only hampers the Trump administration’s work but also slows the Senate’s ability to consider legislative proposals.
“When we’re on the executive calendar, we’re not legislating,” Lee said. “[T]here are a lot of bad things that have evolved in our law, a lot of things that need to be reformed or repealed entirely. … Those are all things that we can’t do when we’re stuck incessantly on the executive calendar.”
While President Donald Trump could use recess appointments to temporarily fill the roles, those appointments would expire at the end of the Senate’s next session. Lee would prefer to skip the August recess to work on the backlog but would support Trump’s using recess appointments if the Senate proceeds with its scheduled break.
To counter Democrat efforts to delay confirmations, Lee said persistence is “the number one tool that we have.”
“You just have to exhaust them to the point where they no longer want to delay,” Lee said. Tell them we’re not leaving until all [approximately] 150 … of these people are confirmed. And then they’ll buckle down and we can start doing votes that last only 10 minutes. We’ll do them back-to-back all day long.”
Democrat senators have defended their tactics, but in a separate interview with The Daily Signal, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., accused her colleagues of “being obstructionists.”
A lightly edited transcript of Lee’s interview with The Daily Signal is below.
Philip Roberts: Out of the nominees awaiting confirmation, which ones would you prioritize?
Sen. Mike Lee: That is a fairly surprisingly difficult question to answer. And I say that not as a cop out, but rather I’m reluctant to answer it for the simple reason that there are so many of them that are important and that are time-sensitive that I think we need to get them confirmed.
We need to work through the entire process, get them all confirmed, or at least most of them.
Here’s one way of looking at it: A bunch of them are ambassadors, a bunch of others are assistant secretaries, undersecretaries of this, that, or the other people running this or that agency or division of an existing department. And then I believe we’ve got a handful of U.S. attorneys in there. Those are really important, especially right now.
Even as I outline this, it reminds me of the fact that the president—whoever is president of the United States at any given time—needs to be in charge of the executive branch.
Now, my copy of the Constitution puts the president of the United States in charge of the executive branch, meaning it literally says the executive power in the U.S. government is vested in the president. You can’t just leave him not in charge.
Now, take the U.S. attorneys, for example. All of them should be hired and fireable by the president. There are some bad laws, bad statutes in place that do things like allow the president to name an interim U.S. attorney for a limited period of time.
And then when that time runs out, that person can be replaced by the federal judges serving in that district. It’s lawless because you get people in a different branch—in the branch of government least accountable to the people, the judicial branch—making hiring decisions for the executive branch. And that’s just wrong.
And then you look at the ambassadors. They are representatives of the United States of America, and they’re supposed to represent the president and the United States government. Without an ambassador on the ground, the deputy chief of mission steps in and serves as what they call the charge affair.
Roberts: What’s your response to critics who say that rushing to clear the backlog undermines the vetting process?
Lee: By the time somebody gets to the Senate floor, they’ve gone through a really elaborate, very time intensive, and quite thorough vetting process.
They’ve been through committee. They’ve filled out an incredibly large volume of forms providing all kinds of information about every aspect of their life. They’ve been subjected to questioning in hearings, and very often they’ve met with members who are even not part of the committee.
So, with respect to any of these people [awaiting confirmation]—the current number is somewhere in the range of around 150—the point is there’s not a single person, if confirmed anytime soon on the Senate floor, where you could fairly say they’ve been rushed and we’ve given short shrift to the vetting process. Many, if not most of these cases, these guys have been vetted for months.
Roberts: Why are some of your fellow Republican senators unwilling to cancel the August recess?
Lee: They’d rather not be here. And I get it. Most people … if given the option … would say, “If I get paid the same way, either way, I’d rather just choose what I decide to do.”
I also want to be clear: I don’t mean to minimize what’s done [during recess]. Some people refer to any recess that we take as a vacation. It’s not quite that.
Most members do a lot of work when they’re home, when we’re on “recess.” It’s why we call it the formal name for it isn’t even recess. It’s in-state work period, because the idea is that during that work period, very often there are other things that need to happen: meeting with various people in your state or sometimes in other parts of the country or other parts of the world.
People were accustomed to that. They’re accustomed to the tradition. It’s become part of what they’re used to. And they’ve probably, in many instances, made other plans. Most of us have plans with the combination of family, constituents, whatever it is. They’ve made plans around it. So, they don’t want to break those plans. I understand that.
But the fact remains, we still have a government to staff. We have the president of the United States, elected by the American people with an agenda, and he can’t run his administration. He’s not really in charge of it unless he’s got his own chosen people in there. Sure, he can appoint people as acting undersecretary of this or that, but it’s not the same. They’re not perceived the same.
They’re not treated the same, yet it ends up being very different. He really needs to have his own people, his own Senate-confirmed people in place or else he’s not really in charge. And it matters more, I think, for Republicans to worry about this.
If Donald Trump were a Democratic president and we were a Democratic Senate, I don’t think our failure to confirm these guys—150 of them before we leave in August—would be nearly as severe. Why?
Well, it’s very simple: the Deep State. It’s the understatement of the century to say that they lean Left. They’re overwhelmingly Democrats. They’re overwhelmingly leftists. And so, it’s kind of like the “heads we win, tails you lose” thing.
But when Democrats control an administration and then they don’t get their people confirmed and the career civil servants are left in charge, Democrats are still in charge.
Those guys are all Democrats. But when it’s a Republican, it’s also a Democrat until we can get those people confirmed.
Roberts: Would you support President Trump’s using recess appointments if the recess isn’t canceled?
Lee: Yes, and this is why I’ve been saying we’ve got to pick a horse and ride it.
What I mean by that is I think we should not take a recess. We have a lot of work to do. We don’t want the Deep State in charge … because … look at the revelations of the last week alone, just the things that we’ve learned about these horrific scandals that have been run by the Deep State.
They have compromised; they have commandeered enough of Donald Trump’s presidency already in his previous administration. They tried to delegitimize him. We shouldn’t subject him to another minute of this, so we shouldn’t do it.
Now, if the Senate makes the unfortunate, and I believe very unwise, decision to recess anyway without first getting these nominees cleared off the confirmation backlog … we should not be recessing and in a way that leaves us subject to these pro forma sessions.
Pro forma sessions occur roughly every 72 hours. And in a pro forma session, all that happens is typically one member of the Senate comes in, a member of the majority party, gavels in and gavels out, and the whole thing lasts about a minute.
Basically, it says, call the Senate to order. And now you immediately end of the session and say, we’ll reconvene on Aug. 4 or whatever it is. So, it’s just that you gavel in and gavel out. The whole thing takes literally one minute.
The only purpose for that is to prevent the president of the United States from making recess appointments. So that’s why my point is, we should not take a recess, and if we do take a recess, let’s take an actual recess. None of this fake recess nonsense. If we’re going to recess, let’s own it and do it … in a way that ladies and gentlemen [would do]. But let’s be real about it.
Roberts: Would you support changing Senate rules permanently to speed up confirmations, or just to get through this backlog?
Lee: I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and an argument can be made that maybe we ought to change some of the rules. Maybe we need to make some modifications to the statute, to the laws that decide which provisions are Senate-confirmed, which are not.
I think a fair argument can be made that maybe there are too many. I think there are about 1,300 executive branch nominations that are currently Senate-confirmed. I’m not sure all of those need to be sent [to the Senate] and confirmed.
And then I think one could also consider either making a rule change or adopting a standing order, which is sort of the same practical effect, but it is a little bit easier to adopt in which you could further curtail the use of cloture and post cloture debate time during the confirmation process.
But I am not really of the belief that is the be all end all that’s even necessarily the right thing to do. My bottom-line concern with it is just why not, before we go trying to change rules, just use the existing rules that we have and work the better way of solving this?
It doesn’t have to involve changing rules. I’m open to considering that, but I don’t think we have to have it. I think what we have to do is work.
Ever since Harry Reid nuked the executive calendar of filibuster in November of 2013, it’s been pretty well understood that it’s the prerogative, in some ways, it’s seen as the duty, as the opposition party. Whereas here, the Senate majority is under control of the same party as the president’s party.
People just sort of see the opposition party’s role as being to delay and obstruct because there’s no 60-vote cloture standard on the executive calendar. … That’s kind of their role.
But that being the case, it’s not really on us. It’s not the fault of the rules. [Democrats] did create this backlog. They created a lot of delay, and they have delayed more than [Republicans] have. I don’t want to make this sound like a complete moral equivalency.
They have delayed far more than we have in the past. You can quibble about the numbers here and there, but they’ve been more obstructionists than any other Senate has on these things in very, very many, many decades.
So, it’s on us at that point to deal with it. The number one tool that we have to deal with delay in the Senate is exhaustion. It’s the principle of exhaustion. You just have to exhaust them to the point where they no longer want to delay.
There’s no better way of doing that, nothing that comes even close than to make people vote at inconvenient times when they’d rather be somewhere else.
There’s no better time to do that than August. That’s my preferred way of dealing with this. Keep them here, make them vote until this is done. Tell them we’re not leaving until all [approximately] 150—or whatever it is—of these people are confirmed.
And then they’ll buckle down and we can start doing votes that last only 10 minutes. We’ll do them back-to-back all day long. And during August, since this wasn’t part of the original master plan, there haven’t been committee hearings or markups planned for that time period. Not a lot of other constituent meetings have been timed. So, we can get a lot more done, a lot faster, and if they stop obstructing, we could knock this out a lot faster.
Here’s the other part of this. It gets even worse than this. If we don’t do it, if we leave, especially if we leave without letting Trump make recess appointments and we don’t get this done, it’s going to impact all kinds of things.
For example, I did the math a few days ago and concluded that if we, in order to go at roughly the same pace we have been, it’ll probably be April—perhaps late April—before we’re done with this slate of roughly 150 nominees. And that’s a lot of time that we’ll have to spend doing that rather than doing other stuff that legislating.
And that interferes with our ability to legislate. When we’re on the executive calendar, we’re not legislating. We’re just confirming. And so those are other issues that we might otherwise want to use to deal with.
I’m not necessarily a believer in the fact that Congress is always making the country better off when it’s making new law, because a lot of times Congress makes things worse. But that said, there are a lot of bad things that have evolved in our law, a lot of things that need to be reformed or repealed entirely that have been put in place over the years that are bad for the country.
Those are all things that we can’t do when we’re stuck incessantly on the executive calendar. And now, in theory, we could speed that up, but that would require more time away from the legislative calendar. And I mentioned the fact that it would take us until probably late April to get through the executive calendar. Well, by then, during that time, guess what’s going to happen? We’ll probably have another 200-plus nominees come out of committee between now and April.
These guys have obstructed so much to a record-breaking degree. According to one set of metrics—there are different ways to measure these things—but some have said you have to go back to the Herbert Hoover administration to find a Senate that has been more dilatory in confirming a president’s nominees.
We’ll never get caught up unless we do this. And it’ll impact not only our ability to confirm other subsequently arriving nominees, but also our legislative counter. And that’s bad.
