The Senate Can’t Keep Nuking Its Own Rules

When Americans choose a president, they expect the administration to reflect that choice. A vote for the presidency is also a vote for the team that carries out their will and the vision they campaigned on. The Constitution vests the Senate with the responsibility to provide advice and consent on those appointed by the president—to test nominees for competence and fidelity to the law, not to weaponize the process against a president staffing their administration. That responsibility is solemn and should be exercised with discipline rather than twisted into an excuse for obstruction or hollowed out by shortcuts.

Right now, Senate Republicans are frustrated by the backlog of President Donald J. Trump’s nominees. In response, Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) intends to use the “nuclear option” to speed up confirmations. He isn’t rushing individual nominations to the floor; instead, he has filed a resolution that would bundle dozens of sub-cabinet nominees into a bloc vote. When the cloture motion fails at the usual 60-vote threshold, he plans to appeal and set a new precedent that allows those nominees to advance with a simple majority. It’s being framed as the only way to break the logjam, but senators should know better.

The “nuclear option” is a maneuver that bypasses the Senate’s standing rules by creating a new precedent. Under Rule XXII, it takes support from three-fifths of senators (usually 60) to end debate on a nomination. Once cloture is invoked, up to 30 hours of floor time remain before the final vote, which includes speeches, quorum calls, and procedural motions. Changing that rule outright would require two-thirds of senators (usually 67) to vote for it. Instead, by a simple majority, the Senate can reinterpret its rules through precedent. The result is that, while Rule XXII still requires 60 affirmative votes to invoke cloture, precedents now allow 51—Senate math where a simple majority effectively equals three-fifths.

Republicans did not pioneer this strategy. In 2013, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) detonated the first bomb by eliminating the 60-vote threshold for executive branch and lower-court nominees. Four years later, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) extended the precedent set by Democrats to Supreme Court nominees. By 2019, Republicans had pushed the button again to slash post-cloture debate time from 30 hours down to two for most nominations, excluding Cabinet officials, circuit court judges, and Supreme Court justices. Each time the bar is lowered, the “unthinkable” becomes routine. Which raises the next question: How long before the legislative filibuster falls, too? The Senate has long been the last line of defense against forcing through deeply controversial bills, and conservatives—often on the minority side of power—will be the first to feel the sting if that firewall collapses.

Some argue that Democrats will kill the filibuster anyway, so Republicans might as well use the nuclear option to secure their own priorities while they still can. But a significant number of senate Democrats already regret their 2013 decision, which later allowed Trump to transform the courts in ways progressives still lament. For now, the consequences of their 2013 decision still loom large, making it less likely that Democrats would be inclined to pursue that route again. For the GOP, normalizing a tactic that was once taboo would be even riskier—every time they push the button, they make it easier for Democrats to follow suit should they regain power.

Critics will point to Merrick Garland’s stalled Supreme Court nomination in 2016 as proof that Republicans also engaged in obstruction. But McConnell’s decision not to act on Garland’s nomination was a refusal to engage—a political choice not to move the nomination forward in an election year, which is squarely within the Senate’s existing rules and followed precedent established by then-Senator Joe Biden. By contrast, today’s Democratic obstruction operates by exploiting the procedural machinery of the Senate itself, forcing cloture votes and consuming maximum debate time to bog down dozens of nominees at once. The damage is broader and more corrosive: Instead of one nominee being denied consideration, the entire confirmation process grinds to a halt. And when the majority responds with the nuclear option to break that procedural blockade, it doesn’t just resolve a standoff—it rewrites Senate precedents in ways that weaken the institution.

The nuclear option isn’t the silver bullet its defenders claim, either. We heard in 2019 that reducing debate hours would clear the decks, yet Politico reported “record-breaking gridlock” on Trump’s nominees the very next year. The truth is that gridlock persists not because the rules are impossible, but because the majority refuses to use them.

It’s also a myth that nuking the rules means the Senate will finally do its job. In fact, it usually means senators spend even less time at work. The real secret about Democratic obstruction is that it only works because Republicans let it. After cloture, each senator may speak for up to one hour (the two-speech rule no longer applies). Additionally, because post-cloture time isn’t equally divided between the two parties, it can’t be yielded back—only shortened by unanimous consent or by voting once no other senator seeks recognition. If the majority leader were to keep the Senate in session and force Democrats to use the time they demand, many of those hours would vanish quickly. And when consideration time extends into the middle of the night, the number of senators willing to hold the floor drops even more.

Personnel is policy, and nothing has made that lesson clearer than the bureaucracy actively working to undermine Trump, who cannot carry out his mandate without staff in place. But that reality doesn’t justify violating the Senate’s rules again—it demands that senators do the hard work to enforce the rules already on the books.

The temptation to go nuclear is strong because it looks like an easy fix. However, every time senators change precedent for expedience, they chip away at the Senate’s identity. The institution that was designed to be deliberative, to protect minority rights, and to force consensus becomes a smaller House with longer terms. That’s not what the Founders intended.

There is a better path. It may be harder, but it’s the path the Senate was designed to take. Put in the hours. Work the floor. Enforce the rules. America gave Trump the responsibility of leading the country, and he deserves a team in place to help him do it. The Senate can deliver on that responsibility—not by going nuclear again, but by living up to its constitutional role. Republicans should resist the false promise of shortcuts and prove the Senate can do its job the right way instead.