The Constitution gives the president the power to nominate and, with the Senate’s “advice and consent,” to appoint men and women to approximately 2,000 positions in the executive and judicial branches. Such appointments are critical for a new president, especially when he replaces a president of the other party.

Typically, appointments are easier to secure when the same party controls both nominations and confirmations. But while that’s the case today, the Senate just left town for a month—leaving behind a poor record of approving President Donald Trump’s second-term nominations.

The best way to evaluate the process is to focus on four datapoints: the number of nominations sent to the Senate, the percentage of nominations approved by committees, the percentage of nominations approved only after a separate procedural vote, and the percentage of available nominations finally confirmed.

Since this is an ongoing process, it’s useful to examine cumulative progress over time. So let’s assess the state of things by looking at the period from Inauguration Day until Aug. 3, the date that the current August recess began, for the current and previous two administrations. In all three, the president’s party also controlled the Senate.

Nominations.

Needless to say, the Senate cannot consider, let alone confirm, nominations a president has not made. This year, Trump set and has maintained a robust nominations pace. By the end of March, he had sent 172 nominations to the Senate, three times as many as Biden in 2021 and five times as many as he previously sent the Senate in 2017.

By Aug. 3, Trump had sent 467 nominations to the Senate, compared to Biden’s 373 and Trump’s first-term total of 313.

Committee Action.

Nominations received by the Senate are first referred to the relevant committees for consideration and each committee decides how that consideration occurs. This year, Senate committees approved 17.4% of available nominations by the end of March, compared to 31.6% in 2021 and 45.7% in 2017. Yet those percentages reflect, at least to some extent, the number of nominations under consideration by those committees: large in 2025, moderate in 2021, and relatively small in 2017.

Committee consideration of Trump’s second-term nominations steadily accelerated in April, though, and by the time the Senate left on Aug. 3, committees had approved 60.4% of the nominations they received. By comparison, the approval rate changed little in 2021 or 2017.

Cloture.

Nominations approved by committees are listed on the Senate’s executive calendar. Trump’s strong nomination pace, and the increasing rate of committee approvals, means that the Senate has had a substantial, and growing, number of nominations available for confirmation.

The majority leader decides when to consider which nominations on the calendar—which is where the picture gets more complicated. The minority can take steps to make final Senate consideration and confirmation slow and cumbersome rather than efficient.

The main obstructive step they can take is to force the Senate to take a separate vote to invoke cloture, that is, to end debate, on a nomination before it can finally vote on confirmation. The right to debate has been an important part of how the Senate considers legislation for more than 200 years and, to protect this right, ending debate requires a supermajority. When an attempt to end debate fails, a filibuster occurs.

Extended debate was never intended to be part of the confirmation process. But in 1949, the Senate amended its cloture rule to apply to any pending “matter” rather than “measure.”

That tweak was to reach all legislative actions, including motions that had previously been excluded; it was not intended, though, to reach outside the legislative process altogether. Indeed, no one even suggested that the cloture rule should apply to nominations, and the Senate took a cloture vote on only 25 nominees over the next 50 years, confirming 22 of them.

Democrats changed all that in 2003 when, while in the minority in the Senate, they started using cloture to run the clock on many of President George W. Bush’s first-term judicial nominations, which meant that it would take 60 votes to cut off debate and proceed to a vote on confirmation, which only required a majority vote.

10 years later, the partisan script had flipped, with Democrats in the White House and controlling the Senate. That November, Democrats deployed the now-infamous “nuclear option” to neutralize the very filibusters they had used a decade earlier. The presiding officer, backed by a 52-48 party-line Senate vote, declared that “three-fifths” in the cloture rule would mean a simple majority (at least for nominations). That’s right, 60 would now equal 51.

While cloture could no longer be used to defeat majority-supported nominations, changing the rule’s meaning but not its text meant that the cloture process still exists. Because that process requires a separate vote and adds a couple of days to the confirmation timetable for each nomination, it can still make approving the president’s nominations slower and more cumbersome.

To be fair, Republicans were the first to use cloture votes to delay, rather than prevent, confirmation. In 2014, frustrated by the Democrats’ nuclear sleight-of-hand a few months earlier, Republicans forced the Senate to take a cloture vote on 114 nominations, more than during the previous 25 years combined.

This year, 90.4% of confirmed nominees first had to jump to through the cloture hoop, compared to 46.3% in 2021 and 23.3% in 2017.

While there’s no doubt that these cloture votes make confirming nominations more time-consuming, it’s well-known that cloture is part of the Democrats’ obstruction arsenal. And past experience shows that a determined majority can achieve significant progress despite this tactic. In 2014, for example, the Senate confirmed 89 of Obama’s judicial nominations, the fourth-highest single-year total in history, despite having to take cloture votes on 79 of them.

Confirmation.

This year, the percentage of available nominations—those cleared by committee and sent to the full Senate for consideration—ultimately confirmed dropped steadily and stood at 47.9% when the Senate left for the August recess. This compares to 72.8% in 2021 and 76.4% in 2017.

This year’s Senate started out in third place and dropped further and further behind ever since. The tally would have been even worse were it not for a last-minute confirmation surge—nearly one-third of all nominations confirmed this year were approved in the three weeks before the August recess. Unfortunately, that was too little, too late.

A stronger and more consistent pace over the last several months would have produced better results. Something as simple as being in session and taking votes on Fridays would have helped. As of July 31, however, the Senate had not been in session on 16 Fridays outside of scheduled recess periods. That nearly equals the annual average over the last 30 years.

Republicans have answered growing criticism of their confirmation pace by observing that this is first time none of a president’s nominations has been confirmed by unanimous consent, or voice vote—a quick and easy method that takes about 15 seconds and does not require the presence of all senators. Instead, every confirmation this year has been by a recorded, or roll call, vote that requires the senators’ presence and takes an average of 45 minutes or more.

That observation, while interesting, is irrelevant. Confirmation results do not matter if confirmation votes do not occur. And the problem is that the Senate has not taken nearly enough confirmation votes at all.

The Senate will return after Labor Day, and it has a lot to prove. Actions—that is, votes—speak louder than words.

The post The Senate’s Gone for August: Here’s What They Left Behind appeared first on The Daily Signal.