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Senate Republicans are urging President Donald Trump to nominate two permanent Cabinet secretaries, hoping to win confirmation of a new attorney general and labor secretary before the midterms while they still have guaranteed control over the confirmation process.
Trump has installed two acting officials in the wake of Pam Bondi leaving as attorney general and Lori Chavez-DeRemer exiting as secretary of labor, and even if Trump decides to keep Todd Blanche and Keith Sonderling in those roles, most Senate Republicans would like real confirmation votes on them. A full confirmation vote gives Cabinet secretaries more legitimacy, offers administration officials more certainty, and helps turn the page on scandal-plagued predecessors like Chavez-DeRemer.
“It’s always better to have Senate-confirmed nominees from the Senate’s perspective, because then they are going to be subject to oversight by the Senate. If they’re just temporary, that’s much harder to do,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “Plus, I think [all] of those agencies … would benefit from some stability and predictability rather than uncertainty.”
The ouster of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and swift confirmation of her replacement Markwayne Mullin, a former Republican senator, shows the administration — and the Senate — can move quickly when they want to. And both Blanche and Sonderling have been confirmed by the Senate already as deputies.
But nominating Blanche as attorney general could be a risk for Trump because of Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who says he will not vote for judicial nominees who supported pardons of Jan. 6 defendants convicted of violent crimes.
Last month Blanche touted those very pardons at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. “If you look at what happened to the men and women convicted because of Jan. 6, by 5 p.m., on Jan. 20, every one of them was either pardoned or had their sentence commuted, so when folks say ‘you’ve done nothing,’ I say you have a very short memory,” Blanche said then. Tillis told Semafor that Blanche’s statement put him in “dangerous waters.”
Tillis can unilaterally block any nominee in the Judiciary Committee given the narrow margin. And he’s shown willingness to flex that muscle by halting the confirmation process of Trump’s Federal Reserve pick Kevin Warsh over an investigation into current Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
Blanche is “not a politician in his current state. But when you start acting like a politician, you get treated like one,” Tillis told Semafor. “The more recent comments are really what drew my attention. So that I have to parse through. The minute you give somebody slack, then you’ve lost the principle, right? And the principle here is that anybody who didn’t back the blue on January 6th is disqualified from consideration for me in the Judiciary Committee.”
A White House official said the administration has no personnel announcements to make but that Trump has “assembled a world-class team.”
The administration has another high profile spot to fill after Navy Secretary John Phelan left his role on Wednesday.
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During Trump’s first term, he relied on several acting officials, particularly for the Department of Homeland Security. Former President Joe Biden followed that precedent, installing Julie Su, the deputy labor secretary, as his acting secretary of labor for nearly two years. Republicans hated that: Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., even introduced a bill that would bar a deputy labor secretary from serving at the top job indefinitely.
Now the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chair, Cassidy said he’s not deviating from his previous stance with Trump in the White House.
“I would very much like to see permanent nominees. That’s the way the Constitution was set up,” Cassidy told Semafor. “We just need to be consistent with our country — in all wisdom, celebrating 250 years — what got us here. So I think it’s a better way.”
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who is close with the administration, said he expects the president to tap two new nominees for both Cabinet positions and that they would move “pretty fast.” Scott is urging the administration to nominate Sonderling to the permanent role: “I think they should take Keith Sonderling and absolutely make sure he’s the secretary. He’s from Florida, I appointed him to the first thing he ever did.”
Room for Disagreement
Some Republicans are deferring to the administration. They say they’ll move quickly to confirm new nominees if Trump wants — but won’t take issue if the president relies on acting officials for some time.
“We’re going to support the president. He can have the people that he wants around him, and he’ll make those decisions, and we’ll make sure to get them in place by hearings and getting through the committee process and confirming them,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told Semafor. “Whatever the president feels is best for him. It’s his Cabinet.”
Burgess’s view
Trump might not be able to get Blanche confirmed given Tillis’ stance, but there’s a decent incentive for the president to push to get confirmed officials in both of these posts before the midterms, rather than afterwards. Even if Republicans manage to hold the Senate, they’re unlikely to grow their majority — meaning confirmations won’t get any easier next year.
And relying on acting officials in Cabinet jobs for more than two years seems unlikely to benefit either the administration or GOP senators. Plus, it would set more precedent for Democrats to lean on in the future, as Biden did with Su.