Harry Reid and Senate Democrats have got a huge job ahead of them, starting November 12, when they return to work post-election. There are
156 pending nominations—people who have been approved by committee and are waiting for floor votes—along with passing a continuing resolution to keep the government functioning after January 1. Those nominations are
going to be the major push of the lame duck session, a push that will be even more critical if Republicans are going to come back next year in the majority.
"We will definitely move a lot of nominees during the lame duck one way or the other — possibly more if Republicans take the majority," said a Democratic Senate leadership aide.
The aide expressed confidence that Democrats would retain control of the Senate, but speculated that due to the "bleak prospects for confirmation under a Republican majority, there will be a strong incentive to get as many confirmed during the lame duck as possible." […]
Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said, "It would be crazy if [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid did not call them back as soon as possible and go into long hours, night and day, to process as many confirmations as he can." But he cautioned that doing so "will inflame Republicans and drive them absolutely batshit."
Well, more batshit, to be precise. Because the main reason that there are 156 nominations that haven't been acted on is that the Republicans went batshit after Democrats passed limited filibuster reform last year, and have thrown every obstacle in their procedural toolbox at Reid. It's a substantial toolbox, allowing the minority to bring everything the Senate does to a near standstill. That's a primary reason the backlog has gotten to be so huge—too huge for all of the nominees to possibly be be acted upon. The only way all of them could be passed would be for Republicans to consent to mass voice votes, and that has about as much of a chance of happening as Mitch McConnell becoming
People magazine's sexiest man alive.
So Reid and the Democrats have to prioritize, and a top priority will be President Obama's as-of-yet unnamed nominee to replace Attorney General Eric Holder. Then they'll focus on judicial nominees and ambassadors. The big unknown for Reid right now, as he plans out the lame-duck strategy, is if he'll still be majority leader come January. If polling forecasts prove true and Republicans do take the Senate, you can bet they'll block any nominee Obama sends to them. They can hold them up in committee and McConnell can refuse to bring them to the floor. So which nominees Reid will focus on in the lame duck session will in large part depend on who is going to be coming back in January. Even that picture might not be entirely clear, as right now it's very possible that there will have to be run-offs in Georgia and Louisiana.
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Clearly, the best possible outcome would be that Democrats maintain their majority and come back to fight Republican obstruction (and possibly enact more filibuster reforms?) next year. Most of those 156 nominees will have to be renominated and go through the process all over again, but at least they'd have a hope of someday serving. And we'd have a government functioning at the hobbled level it currently is, instead of in a Republican-led virtual shutdown.