The Daily Signal - The Senate Struggles to Confirm Nominees Almost a Year Into Trump's 2nd Term | Dec. 10, 2025

Starting point is 00:00:00 Senate Republicans struggle to confirm the Trump administration's nominations amid procedural molasses. Our president, Rob Bluey, joins us for more. I'm Tony Kinnett, host of the Daily Signals, Tony Kinnett cast, syndicated nationally at 7 p.m. Eastern. It is Wednesday, December 10th, 2025. This is the Daily Signals. Top News in 10. We bring on Rob Bluey, President of the Daily Signal, getting into a little bit of that good hill stuff. How are things in the sewer of Washington, D.C.? Well, frigid today, Tony. It's quite cold in the nation's capital.

Starting point is 00:00:38 And I think everybody on Capitol Hill is probably itching to get back home to their districts. It's not as if they've spent a lot of time there this year. They certainly have. But there are a few things that they need to clear before the end of the year. And there are some pretty basic functions that Congress typically does this time of year. and we'll see if they can get them done with the narrow majorities in both the House and Senate. So that's one of the things I wanted to get your opinion on. President Trump caught on the hot mic, basically unsatisfied to the extreme with the Republican Senate.

Starting point is 00:01:13 Hey, Jeff. Thank you, President. You know, I cannot appoint anything. Huh? I can't appoint anybody. Everybody I'm appointed. Their time is expired. And then they're in default.

Starting point is 00:01:29 Getting a lot of these appointees nominated and confirmed, having attorneys resigning at the end of that 120-day mark doesn't look good for the administration, and maybe going after Holly, some conversation about blue ticketing or blue stamping, blue checking. What's going on in the approvals process? Yeah, so a few things there to explain. Number one, during President Trump's first term, certainly there was a significantly, faster pace when it came to confirmations, precisely because the Democrats were not standing in the way as they are now. They were allowing votes to go through for certain nominees, whereas now they're insisting on maximizing all of the time that is allotted for senators to consider these nominations, which has resulted in Republicans now packaging these nominees into one big bundle. But it takes

Starting point is 00:02:23 some time. And if you get something wrong, as they did last week, it can drag out to a, to a And President Trump, I don't think, has any patience for that, because these are individuals that he wants in their job, making sure that they are executing the administration's policy. Specifically, when it comes to those blue slips. Yes, so it's a policy, longstanding policy in the U.S. Senate, where the two home state senators, which in some cases are two Democrats, get to have a say over who some of the nominees might be for some of the appointments. And that has not necessarily been the direction that President Trump has wanted to go. He's not somebody who oftentimes will respect that tradition that exists. And for good reason, he wants to drain the swamp, as he so often says. And so that's some of the issues that are going on in the Senate.

Starting point is 00:03:11 I'm hopeful that Senator Thune and the Republicans can push some of these through before the end of the year because, let's face it, we're coming up on the one-year mark of the inauguration. That's a long time to wait. Yeah, that's one of the things that maybe I'm, you know, as we've joked about before, maybe I'm uncouth, maybe I'm just some, you know, dumb, bum, hick, Hoosier. But I just have a little bit of an issue with all of these big national proceedings being held up by, well, according to Roberts rules of order, you need a blow-slip procedure so the home senator from Nebraska gets to talk for three hours. Why? Why? There are U.S. attorneys that need to prosecute,

Starting point is 00:03:50 not just individuals from prior administrations, but violent criminals who have committed disgusting crimes right now. And we can't because, well, her 120-day temporary setup is up. This seems like nonsense to the American people. And that's going to have some 2026 implications. It certainly is. I mean, you saw the frustration from President Trump during the government shutdown when the Senate voted repeatedly and Democrats consistently withheld their votes for Republicans to block them from getting the 60 votes needed to overcome that hurdle, the filibuster as we commonly know it. And President Trump said, get rid of it. I've had enough. Just do it. The Democrats would do it if they were in charge. I have no doubt about that. But it's one of those

Starting point is 00:04:37 things that consistently and historically has allowed conservatives to block some pretty bad pieces of legislation, whether that be during Barack Obama's presidency, Bill Clinton's presidency, Joe Biden's presidency go back even farther than that. Certainly Democrats would have wanted to strip away some Second Amendment rights. They probably would have wanted to impose cap and trade climate policies. They would have done some pro-union, pro-labor policy. So there are all sorts of things that Republicans point to and remind the president of reasons why we've kept some of these rules in place. However, when it comes to nominees, we are in some uncharted territory.

Starting point is 00:05:11 There used to be some more bipartisan agreement when it came to putting these individuals in positions of government. whether that be a judge or whether that be an administrative appointee. And the Democrats have thrown that entirely out the window. And they said, we're going to do everything we can to stymie the president in his agenda. So if you actually have a Republican Senate who I remember, because Trump wanted to get a lot of these appointees confirmed during the shutdown, did let me just, you know, swing on through, confirm them all during the shutdown. And I remember seeing that the Republican Senate said, hang on, just trust us.

Starting point is 00:05:44 We're going to get these people confirmed. and now we are weeks and weeks and weeks after this shutdown, and we're getting to the end of the year, and I'm looking at all of these high-profile cases when you have someone who body slams federal agents, and the individual prosecuting her says, why I have to step down from this prosecution, not because there's anything wrong with the prosecution,

Starting point is 00:06:04 because the Senate didn't get off its butt and confirm her. That's a bit of an issue for me, and it's an issue for a lot of Americans. I know we've written on it extensively at the Daily Signal because there are things that need doing and just counting on having control the House and the Senate for the next two years after the midterms, it's a kind of gamble that makes me uncomfortable.

Starting point is 00:06:23 It's a big gamble. And you know that if the Democrats gain control of the House, they're likely to start impeachment proceedings against President Trump almost immediately. I don't think there will be... You know Al Green's itching is no dastardly deeds. Exactly. For dastardly deeds proposed and dastardly deeds done.

Starting point is 00:06:41 I don't think it'll go anywhere in the Senate, but if they gain control of the Senate, you can expect that the presidents, the appointments and nominees that he's making will grind to a complete halt. Can you see a Democrat, majority leader in the Senate advancing any judges? No, I mean, I think that they would go to the extreme and try to block almost all of the appointments from happening. And so that speaks to the urgency that you're talking about. Now, Tony, there was something in the past that a president could use. It was called a recess appointment. Now, that was not a permanent appointment, but they were able to put somebody in place. In fact, Hans Fons

Starting point is 00:07:17 Bikovsky, who's a friend of your show and of mine and the Daily Signal, a frequent contributor, was one of the last recess appointees made during President George W. Bush's administration. It was after that that Harry Reid, the Democrat majority leader in the Senate's put an end to that. And he said, I'm not allowing it anymore. And ever since we've been in a situation where the president hasn't had that ability. And so there are steps that the Senate could take, and you're right, now is the time to take that action. So, I mean, we're seeing a lot of that kind of era of American bureaucratic governance come to an end. I mean, we're seeing the Supreme Court argue Humphrey's executor,

Starting point is 00:07:54 which sounds like the epitome of the Roberts Rules of Order nonsense. Well, according to Humphrey's executor, you see this kind of silliness that Congress can create these independent agencies that the president can't touch, which again makes no constitutional. sense, that bureaucratic era of American governance from the end of the Cold War, well, from FDR and Wilsonian Americana, all the way up through the Biden administration, seems to be coming to a close. Are we going to see some of these administrative agencies torn down the rest of the way here, especially when it comes to maybe just longstanding rules we've had just because? I think that based on the arguments at the Supreme Court yesterday,

Starting point is 00:08:40 it appears that they are heading in that direction. When you talk about the independent agencies, we're talking about things like the Federal Trade Commission or the Federal Communication Commission, which in the case of the FCC, led by a Trump appointee, Brendan Carr, and the other one and other agencies that might be,

Starting point is 00:08:57 there might be implications for this case. You have individuals who were appointed by maybe a Democrat president who don't want to step down. And the president is saying, know these agencies should follow the guidelines that I'm putting out from my administration. And so executive cohesion, right. Exactly. And this is what the Supreme Court will finally decide and offer some clarity for. And yes, you're right. A lot of these were set up at a time when the experts knew best. And we were going to entitle this expert class in the United States to make a lot of

Starting point is 00:09:31 these decisions. And I think that the American people said, no, the experts don't know best. And we want to make the choices ourselves through the representative that we send to Washington, in this case, President Trump. You can only see so many grown men in skirts before you recognize maybe they're not an expert on health and human services. You can only see so many consistent repeated failures at law enforcement head law enforcement agencies before you're like, man, I think that the experts in this situation are bit topsy and or turvy. It's, again, it really is wild to look inside D.C. from the outside and see people who think that these academic technocrats are, who believe they are so special, are just the emperor without any

Starting point is 00:10:17 clothes. It is true. They have operated that way for a long time. I mean, I think Americans saw it firsthand during COVID when a lot of the people who were at the NIH, the National Institutes of Health and other organizations like that made recommendations that when, against the common sense of so many individuals. And so this is one of the things that I think we, you know, catapulted President Trump back into the White House and put him in a position where he could clean things up and hopefully make some changes for the better where he's giving the power back to the people and not necessarily relying on these agencies to impose the rules and regulations that govern our lives. It really puts a good amount of perspective on just how

Starting point is 00:10:58 important it was that he was able to nominate and confirm the Supreme Court justices that he did. Absolutely. And Tony, going back to your point, who knows if he could do that today given the state of the Senate? So I'm glad he got it done in his first term. That's true. Rob Bowley, President of the Daily Signal, thanks for giving us a little bit of the insight as usual into that wonderful, smelly heap of garbage, Washington, DZ. Thanks, Tony. Before you go, check the description to make sure you're subscribed to the Tony Kennedcast and join us tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern for a roundup of the day's news and nonsense. I'm Tony Kinnett, and this has been The Daily Signals, top news in 10.

Starting point is 00:11:35 Take care.

The Daily Signal - The Senate Struggles to Confirm Nominees Almost a Year Into Trump's 2nd Term | Dec. 10, 2025

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