FIRST ON FOX: Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso is ready to go nuclear on Senate Democrats and their blockade of President Donald Trump’s nominees.
Before leaving Washington, D.C., to their respective home states, Senate Republicans were on the verge of a deal with their colleagues across the aisle to hammer out a deal to ram through dozens of Trump’s picks for non-controversial positions.
But those talks fell apart when Trump nuked any further negotiations over funding demands from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Currently, there are 145 pending nominations on the Senate’s executive calendar, with that number expected to balloon when the upper chamber reopens for business.
SENATE GOP READY TO GO NUCLEAR AFTER SCHUMER'S 'POLITICAL EXTORTION' OF NOMINEES
Lawmakers are set to return on Tuesday, and Barrasso, R-Wyo., wants to immediately tackle the nomination quandary. He’s engaged in a public pressure campaign, writing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal directly calling out Schumer.
Meanwhile, he’s facilitated talks among Senate Republicans on the best path forward, and told Fox News Digital in an interview that, at this point, he’s willing to do anything necessary to see the president’s picks confirmed.
"We need to either get a lot of cooperation from the Democrats, or we're going to have to roll over them with changes of the rules that we're going to be able to do in a unilateral way, as well as President Trump making recess appointments," he said.
Senate Democrats, under Schumer's direction, are unlikely to play ball, however.
Schumer, in response to Barrasso’s public jab against him and Senate Democrats, contended in a statement that "historically bad nominees deserve a historic level of scrutiny by Senate Democrats."
"Anybody nominated by President Trump is, in Schumer's words, ‘historically bad.’ Why? Because they were nominated by President Trump," Barrasso shot back. "That is his sole criteria for which these people are being gone after and filibustered, each and every one of them, even those that are coming out of committee, many, many of whom are with bipartisan support."
Unilaterally changing the rules, or the nuclear option, would allow Republicans to make tweaks to the confirmation process without help from Democrats, but it could also kneecap further negotiations on key items that would require their support to advance beyond the Senate filibuster.
Barrasso was not worried about taking that route, however, and noted that the nominees that he and other Republicans were specifically considering would be "sub-Cabinet level positions" and ambassadors.
Up for discussion are changes to the debate time, what kind of nominee could qualify for a speedier process and whether to give the president runway to make recess appointments, which would require the Senate to go into recess and allow Trump to make appointments on a temporary basis.
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"When you take a look at this right now, it takes a 30-minute roll-call vote to get on cloture, and then two hours of debate time, and then another 30-minute roll-call vote," Barrasso said. "Well, that's three hours, and it's time when you can't do legislation, you can't do any of the other things."
But there is a menu of key items that Congress will have to deal with when they return, particularly the deadline to fund the government by Sept. 30.
Barrasso acknowledged that reality, and noted that it was because of the hefty schedule that he wanted a rules change to be put front and center.
"There's not going to be any time to — or there's going to be limited time, I should say, to actually get people through the nominations process, which is just going to drag on further, and you'll have more people having hearings and coming out of committees," he said.
"This backlog is going to worsen this traffic jam at the Schumer toll booth. So, we are going to do something, because this cannot stand."
