WASHINGTON-At a Senate Rules Committee hearing titled "Senate Procedures to Confirm Nominees", U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Chairwoman of the Committee, led the discussion on the increasing amount of time it has taken for the Senate to confirm nominees from presidents of both parties, the impact of these delays, and how to address them.

"The Framers recognized the importance of the Senate's role to provide a check on the Executive Branch by requiring advice and consent over key positions in our government. As the Rules Committee, it's important that we take a close look at Senate procedures and how they are working and that we are willing to partner across the aisle on common sense measures to improve how we do our work on behalf of the American people,"said Klobuchar.

In May 2023 Senators Klobuchar, Angus King (I-ME), and Ben Cardin (D-MD) introduced a resolution to change the rules of the Senate to streamline the confirmation process by allowing up to 10 nominees to be considered at the same time, excluding certain positions like Circuit Judges, Supreme Court Justices, and Cabinet Secretaries, on the Senate floor.

A rough transcript of Klobuchar's full opening statement is available below. Video is available HEREfor download.

Sen. Klobuchar:Good afternoon. I call to order this hearing of the Rules Committee on Senate procedures to confirm nominees - or get them confirmed, that is our goal. I'd like to thank Ranking Member Fischer and our colleagues for being here, as well as our witnesses Jenny Mattingley from the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service as well as Sean Stiff and Elizabeth Rybicki of the Congressional Research Service. Thank you all for joining us.

Today we're going to hear from these three nonpartisan experts about the increasing amount of time it has been taking for the Senate to confirm nominees from presidents of both parties. We want to make that clear from the beginning: this isn't actually any kind of a partisan fight we're engaging in. Senator Fischer and I get along quite well. We're looking at this in the context of now and in the future and how this has been getting worse and worse and worse, regardless of party and the impact these delays have on our government, have on the people that we want to recruit to be in our government, and what we can do to address it.

The facts speak for themselves. In recent decades, it has taken longer to confirm nominees for each successive president. According to the Partnership for Public Service, in the first two years of the current administration, it took more than 156 days on average to confirm each executive branch nominee, up from 107 days during the Trump administration, 92 days under President Obama, and nearly three times as long as during the Clinton administration, which was 56.8 days. As the Senate spends more of its time working on nominations, this leaves less time for legislating on issues that are important to the American people - difficult issues that sometimes take days to resolve. More than 55 percent of Senate votes in the first two years of both President Biden's and President Trump's terms were on nominations, which is over a six-fold increase compared to the average under the four previous presidents, which was 8.5 percent of votes.

The number of cloture votes - the votes we take to end debate on a nomination - has also skyrocketed, with more than 200 so far for executive branch nominees under our current president and 170 under his predecessor, a dramatic increase from the total of just 20 under both Presidents George W. Bush, who had nine, and Clinton at 11. That's 20 for two presidents, and now we are at over 200 and before that, the last administration had 170.

There are a lot of other statistics that I know you want to hear me roll off here, but one thing is clear and it's very straightforward: under both parties, we're spending a lot more time voting on nominations than in the past, and it's taking more time under each administration. Pretty soon we are going to become a full time employment agency. Although we don't really even discuss the applicants, we just go in and vote and go in and vote.

The time the Senate is spending to confirm nominees not only impacts our work and legislation, but also delays a president - no matter his or her party - from filling important positions.

Here's what that looks like. While the Secretary and Deputy Secretary for five key Cabinet departments (Commerce, Defense, Energy, State and Treasury) took an average of 18 and 67 days respectively, to confirm during this administration, other positions at those departments like undersecretaries and assistant secretaries - the people that you may not read about in the newspaper -they took more than 350 days.

Significantly, it's taking longer for nominees during a president's first year in office, when they're trying to jumpstart their work on key issues, to get confirmed. The average time taken to confirm these nominees in the current and previous administrations was nearly triple what it was under President Reagan.

We know that there are qualified people interested in serving in government regardless of party, and you can leave talented people in limbo for literally a year, years, or at least months creating uncertainty in their lives. It's a reason a lot of people don't even want to try doing it. And that's not what we want in our country.

The good news is there are actions we can take to improve things. One idea is to change the rules of the Senate so we could consider multiple nominees at the same time. We would still have a vote, but we would do what we call blocking them together. And we wouldn't do the top cabinet people that way, but you could do a group within a department that way. That's something that Senators King and Cardin and I have been working on to bundle up to 10 nominees at once - we're not talking about 100 - 10 nominees at once.

This would've allowed the 27 Department of Defense positions we confirmed in the first year of the current administration - not including the Secretary of Defense - to be confirmed in three sets of votes during a single week. What a game changer for the Defense Department and our country's security.

We could also consider an idea such as one Senators Lankford and Blunt proposed in 2019 so that either side could yield back time on the Senate floor if they wanted final votes to happen more quickly by dividing the two hours of time after cloture equally between the parties.

There are also ideas like reducing the number of positions that require Senate confirmation, which is now more than 1,200. I know Chairman Peters on Homeland Security has been interested in this topic.

There is precedent for bipartisan efforts in this area like in 2011 when the Senate passed two proposals with overwhelming support from a bipartisan working group led by Senator Collins and Schumer with Senators Lieberman and Alexander: one to expedite consideration of certain nominations by a vote of 89 to 8 and one to reduce the number of Senate-confirmed positions by 163 by a vote of 79-20. No, it's not much when you're dealing with 1,200 but it's still 163 people that can actually get into the jobs. I supported both these proposals at the time, as did Leader McConnell and Senator Wicker who is on this committee.

What we're here to discuss today is not about giving an advantage to one party or the other. That's why it's good to do it when the election is in flux, and with bipartisan support. These options could be designed to take effect in the future when you don't know who's going to be the president, regardless of the outcome of this election.

The Framers recognized the importance of the Senate's role to provide a check on the Executive Branch by requiring advice and consent over key positions in our government. And as the Rules Committee, it's important that we take a close look at Senate procedures and how they are working and that we are willing to partner across the aisle on common sense measures to improve how we do our work on behalf of the American people.

The only other possibility, if we're not able to do this together, is that one party the other can just do it by invoking what we call the nuclear option - that has happened in the past. I'd rather do this together, but of course, that's also a possibility and it would at least speed things up.

Whatever it is, what we're doing now isn't working on and we're spending all our time on being a full-time employment agency, when there are so many pressing issues before the U.S. Senate.

Thank you for our witnesses for being here. And I'll now recognize Ranking Member Deb Fischer for her opening. Thank you.

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