U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, speaks at Dakotafest in Mitchell on Aug. 20, 2025. (Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight)
U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune was hot under the collar. It wasn’t just because of the August weather, or the crowd at the Dakotafest agricultural trade show in Mitchell, or the pole barn where the crowd was jammed in. Thune was hot because of the way he’s being treated by Senate Democrats.
Those pesky Democrats have thrown up as many roadblocks as they can to delay the filling of more than 1,300 positions in the Trump administration that require Senate confirmation. “We spend two-thirds of our time on personnel in the United States Senate,” Thune said, according to a Dakota Scout story, calling the resistance from the minority party “unprecedented.”
In a recent op-ed, Thune promised that Senate Republicans are working on a rule change that should hurry the process along.
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Gone are the days of the Senate gentlemen’s club where the prevailing tradition was that a president should be allowed to have the nominees he wanted. Thune said 90% of President Barack Obama’s nominees were approved by unanimous consent, a fast way to approve nominees that skips committee hearings and floor debate. About 60% of President Joe Biden’s appointees were approved that way. In Trump’s first term, about half of his nominees were approved without hearings or debates.
The downward trend in using unanimous consent is a direct result of the ideological split in this country. To date, none of Trump’s appointees during his second term have been approved by unanimous consent.
The irony here is that Trump can’t get approval for the people he wants to serve in his administration while, during his first months in office, he’s been busy firing or furloughing thousands of federal government employees.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has sworn to use every weapon in his arsenal to block the Trump agenda. It looks like that includes slowing the Senate confirmation process to a glacial pace.
Senate Democrats may have acted more favorably toward Trump’s nominees if his Cabinet choices to be the leaders in his government weren’t so astoundingly unqualified. In Trump’s first term, he chose high-ranking officials as if casting a movie. They had to have the right look, but with the right look came a reasonable amount of competence. In Trump 2.0, the need for competence has been discarded. This time out, the prevailing quality to serve in the Trump administration is blind loyalty to the president.
There’s no doubting that the likes of Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are loyal to Trump. Their competence at running the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and the nation’s health care are frequently and rightfully questioned. Life probably wouldn’t be so tough for Thune if he and his Senate Republican colleagues had shown some backbone and told the president that competence had to be the standard for Cabinet secretaries rather than just fawning loyalty to the president.
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It’s easy to understand Thune’s frustration. However, he and Senate Republicans brought this on themselves by treating Trump’s Cabinet selections as if they were serious choices rather than a presidential power play to show that he could get anyone he wanted approved by the Senate.
This space has been used before to note that Thune may come to regret, if he doesn’t already, his rise to the top Senate leadership post of his party during a Trump administration. As he complains about the long days he has to put in while fulfilling that role, he should remember that he won the office by claiming that Sen. Tom Daschle was paying too much attention to Senate leadership and not enough attention to South Dakota’s needs.
Senate Democrats may be throwing up roadblocks to Trump’s agenda, but for Republicans this is a self-inflicted wound developed by currying favor with the president rather than doing their jobs. Despite Thune’s complaints, the slow pace of approval for Trump’s nominees is likely what’s best for the country. That’s particularly the case if the nominees Trump seeks to work in his government are anything like the clown car he calls a Cabinet.