I apologize for not writing articles on the last two Sundays. This is my busy point of the year with work, interviews, and other writing assignments competing with my time. It will be spotty until the summer break from school in which I should have a lot of time to write. To be honest, the spotty record of Democrats using these tactics also has slightly sapped my will to write about them...
About a month ago, D.C Acting Attorney Ed Martin was on track to be confirmed. That changed when Sen. Adam Schiff announced that he was using a a more obscure parliamentary procedure known as a hold to delay his nomination indefinitely.
President Trump's controversial choice to be the top federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C.,
Ed Martin, faces an uncertain future, as a Senate Democrat plans to put an indefinite hold on his nomination.
Martin, a "Stop the Steal" advocate and former defense attorney who represented U.S. Capitol riot defendants, is Mr. Trump's nominee to be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and Sen. Adam Schiff, a first-term Democrat from California, plans to hold his nomination amid a growing number of controversial statements and decisions by Martin.
The position is among the highest-profile and most powerful federal prosecutor positions in the U.S. Martin, who refers to himself as "Ed the Eagle," has been serving as acting U.S. attorney for D.C. since Inauguration Day.
Senators have the power to invoke a hold on a presidential nominee, a maneuver that can slow or stall consideration of a nominee for days or weeks. Precious Senate floor time is often needed to overcome holds on presidential nominees.
"For the past nine weeks, Ed Martin has consistently undermined the independence and abused the power of the US Attorney's office in DC, openly threatening and intimidating political opponents, dismissing charges against his own clients, firing public servants for their roles in legitimate investigations and using his office as a cudgel to chill dissent and free speech," Schiff said in a statement to CBS News.
He is not the only Senator to announce a round of holds on nominees. Sen. Brian Schatz has stymied the Trump regime by placing holds on over 300 nominees.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) is expanding his holds on President Trump's nominees to include an additional 50 names — along with a batch of bipartisan foreign affairs bills, Axios has learned.
That brings the total number of Trump nominees Schatz has now ground to a halt to more than 300, intensifying his protest of what he calls the White House's "lawlessness."
- The fresh holds include former Rep. Anthony D'Esposito (R-N.Y.), Trump's pick to be Labor Department inspector general, and Scott Kupor, tapped to lead the Office of Personnel Management.
- The new holds span nominees at more than a dozen Trump administration agencies and departments. Schatz has already placed holds on all State Department nominees.
- Schatz also is blocking nine bipartisan bills that recently cleared the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in protest of what he characterized as the committee's lax oversight of the Trump administration.
Today, I will explore Senate holds — a tactic that one Senator can use to stymie legislation and even nominees effectively.
What is a Senate hold?
Sen. Brian Schatz is using holds to decimate lesser Trump nominees to hobble the Trump agenda.
A Senate hold is as follows:
The Senate "hold" is an informal practice whereby Senators communicate to Senate leaders, often in the form of a letter, their policy views and scheduling preferences regarding measures and matters available for floor consideration. Unique to the upper chamber, holds can be understood as information-sharing devices predicated on the unanimous consent nature of Senate decision-making. Senators place holds to accomplish a variety of purposes—to receive notification of upcoming legislative proceedings, for instance, or to express objections to a particular proposal or executive nomination—but ultimately the decision to honor a hold request, and for how long, rests with the majority leader. Scheduling Senate business is the fundamental prerogative of the majority leader, and this responsibility is typically carried out in consultation with the minority leader.
Most times, Senate holds are announced by the Senator using the procedure, but this is not always the case. Sometimes secrecy is used to place a hold. There are different reasons to have a hold placed on legislation or nominees as outlined below.
Holds can be used to accomplish a variety of purposes. Although the Senate itself makes no official distinctions among holds, scholars have classified holds based on the objective of the communication. Informational holds, for instance, request that the Senator be notified or consulted in advance of any floor action to be taken on a particular measure or matter, perhaps to allow the Senator to plan for floor debate or the offering of amendments. Choke holds contain an explicit filibuster threat and are intended to kill or delay action on the target of the hold. Blanket holds are leveled against an entire category of business, such as all nominations to a particular agency or department. Mae West holds intend to foster negotiation and bargaining between proponents and opponents. Retaliatory holds are placed as political payback against a colleague or administration, while rolling (or rotating) holds are defined by coordinated action involving two or more Senators who place holds on a measure or matter on an alternating basis. Until recently, many holds were considered anonymous (or secret) because the source and contents of the request were not made available to the public, or even to other Senators.
Senate holds were originally meant to delay legislation that affects the home state of a Senator until the issue could be studied further. In the 1970s it was realized that this parliamentary procedure could be used aggressively to stall the legislative agenda of the majority.
The original intent of these sections was to protect a senator's right to be consulted on legislation that affected the senator's state or in which a senator had a great interest. The ability to place a hold would allow that senator an opportunity to study the legislation and to reflect on its implications before moving forward with further debate and voting.
According to Congressional Research Service research, holds were not common until the 1970s, when they became more common due to a less collegial atmosphere and an increasing use of unanimous consent to move business to the floor.
Holds, like filibusters, can be overcome by invoking cloture. That requires 60 votes for legislation and 50+VP votes for nominees. Unlike a filibuster, it takes only 1-2 Senators to completely wreck the agenda when placing holds!
What are some notable examples of Senate holds?
Sen. Tommy Tuberville brought the parliamentary procedure to prominence during the Biden administration by mass blocking promotions and nominees for the military.
Holds have been obscure for those who don’t closely follow the inner workings of the Senate. That changed in the 118th Congress when Sen. Tommy Tuberville placed some radically crippling holds on military promotions and nominees for the Department of Defense. He did so to protest a policy of reimbursing DoD employees who travelled to receive abortion care.
As Congress prepares to head into its August 2023 break, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, shows no signs of ending his five-month-long hold on military promotions for several hundred senior officers, namely generals and admirals.
Tuberville is blocking the Senate from considering their nominations because he opposes a Defense Department policy to reimburse travel expenses for military personnel who have to leave their states to get abortions or other reproductive care.
The policy was put in place after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned previous Supreme Court rulings affirming federal protections for abortion and returned the responsibility of passing abortion laws to the states.
A U.S. senator has the prerogative of placing what is called a hold on a measure, preventing the Senate from acting on that measure.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has characterized Tuberville’s hold as a threat to national defense. Senate Democrats have called him reckless, and more than 550 military families petitioned Tuberville and Senate leaders to end the stalemate. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, has said he does not support a hold on military nominations.
He isn’t the only Republican to abuse this procedure. Back in the 110th Congress, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma became so notorious for placing holds on legislation that he disgusted even his own leadership. One of the first actions of the 111th Congress was to pass an omnibus bill of all of the legislation held up by Coburn, dubbed the “Tomnibus”.
Congress has dealt for decades with catchall bills known as omnibus legislation. Now, for the first time, comes the Tomnibus.
A product of Democratic frustration with the tactics of Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and physician who has become the Dr. No of the Senate, the Tomnibus is a $10 billion collection of Coburn-blocked measures assembled by the Senate leadership in an effort to break his solitary grip on the legislative process.
Engineered by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, the bill includes 35 of the most irresistible-sounding measures stuck on the docket, including the Mothers Act and the Protect Our Children Act.
There are items to commemorate “The Star-Spangled Banner” and to try to curb pornography, cut drug use and help victims of Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Officially known as the Advancing America’s Priorities Act, the catchall legislation includes a measure to improve life for victims of paralysis, which Mr. Reid calls the Superman bill in tribute to the late Christopher Reeve.
One of the most ironic holds came in 2006 on the Federal Funding and Accountability Transparency Act. This was a secret hold so a very opaque measure was used to block it. Eventually, the two Senators who blocked it were deduced by the process of elimination and the measure passed the Senate unanimously!
That farcical effort spurred reform to the Senate hold.
How has the Senate reformed this procedure in recent years?
Senate leadership on both sides of the aisle have pushed for reforms for this procedure in recent decades. The last reform came in 2011.
The hold went from mostly a secret weapon to a public spectacle in 2007.
Enacted on September 14, 2007, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 amended the Senate rules to require public notice of holds within 6 session days.
On April 22, 2010, 69 senators signed a letter to Senate Leaders Reid and McConnell pledging that they would not place secret holds on legislation or nominations, and requesting changes in Senate rules to end the practice
The procedure underwent further reporting requirements in 2011 as the Standing Rules of the Senate were changed.
In response to the limited applicability of Section 512, the Senate established—by a 92-4 vote on January 27, 2011—a standing order (S.Res. 28) that extends notification requirements to a larger share of hold activity. Instead of a six day reporting window, S.Res. 28 provides two days of session during which Senators are expected to deliver their objection notices for publication. The action that triggers the reporting requirement also changed: from an objection on the basis of a colleague's hold request (under Section 512) to the initial transmission of a written objection notice to the party leader (under S.Res. 28).
The proper language to communicate a hold remained largely the same as before, except that holding Senators must now include a statement that expressly authorizes their party leader to object to a unanimous consent request in their name.14 In the event that a Senator neglects to deliver an objection notice for publication within two session days and a party leader nevertheless raises objection on the basis of that hold, S.Res. 28 requires that the name of the objecting party leader be identified as the source of the hold in the "Notice of Intent to Object" section of the appropriate Senate calendar.15 The process of removing an objection notice from either calendar remains unchanged.
During the 112th Congress (2011-2012), a total of 24 objection notices were published in accordance with the provisions of S.Res. 28. Nine notices were printed during the 113th Congress (2013-2014), and 34 were published in the 114th Congress (2015-2016)
There are still calls for reform or for eliminating the procedure all together. As early as 1997, the practice was causing enough problems that Senate leadership attempted to abolish it. This led to more problems than it solved so it was quickly instituted once more as soon as possible. More efforts were made in 2002 and 2003 to remove it but they failed.
The GOP as indicated above has been the primary beneficiary of the procedure but now the Democratic Party is learning to love holds as well.
Conclusion
We resisters need to realize something. There is a misconception that holds PERMANENTLY block nominees or legislation from being considered. That’s not the case, which is why the major nominees of the Trump regime were still voted on and confirmed. Cloture is needed to break a hold and it only takes a simple majority to break it on nominees.
It is more effective for legislation because the vote threshold is higher (60 as opposed to 50+VP). It is also effective at mass blocking lesser nominees because it forces the Senate to use up its most valuable commodity — time — on each nominee or piece of legislation individually. Remember that cloture starts a 30 hour clock and then requires debate (unless it is waived by unanimous consent).
Holds are immensely effective if used correctly. Let us hope that the Democratic Party finds the willpower to place holds on the entire Trump regime agenda.
