BREAKING: Senate confirms 48 Trump nominees after GOP implements 'nuclear option' rule change

The Senate voted 51-47 on Thursday to confirm 48 of President Donald Trump’s nominees in one fell swoop, marking the first major wave of confirmations since Republicans changed chamber rules to overcome a Democratic blockade. Last week, the GOP implemented what they called the“nuclear option,” a rules change that allows groups of lower-level nominees to be approved together instead of one at a time. The shift ended months of stalled confirmations and opened the door to Thursday’s en bloc approval.

“These are just the first,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said during floor remarks, according to The Hill “Republicans have fixed a broken process and restored the Senate precedent that applied to previous presidents — and that is allowing … a majority of a president’s nominees to be confirmed expeditiously. Today is the first slate of nominees. There will be more to come.”

Yeas outweighed the Nays 51 to 47.

All 48 nominees in this round had advanced out of committee with bipartisan support. Most are set to serve in undersecretary or assistant secretary positions across federal agencies, filling roles that had been left vacant during the stalemate.

Republicans pushed through the rule change last week that allowed the Senate to vote on dozens of President Trump’s nominees at once, breaking a logjam that had left roughly 150 lower-level positions unfilled.

The new process comes after Democratic resistance to advancing the Trump picks. With the exception of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, confirmed in January, Democrats forced the GOP to run the full clock on nearly every other nomination, refusing to allow unanimous consent or voice votes.

Thune and other Republicans said the practice had ground the chamber’s business to a halt. After weeks of internal talks and failed attempts at a bipartisan deal before the August recess, Republicans turned to the en bloc method as the fastest way to move stalled nominations.

The rules adjustment was modeled in part on a 2022 proposal from Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Angus King (I-ME), which would have allowed up to 10 nominees from one committee to be bundled together. The GOP plan goes further by imposing no cap on the number of nominees that can be grouped.

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