Just hours before the Senate was set to leave Washington for its August recess, a high-stakes deal to confirm dozens of government officials dramatically imploded.
The negotiations were not broken by the senators in the room, but by a fiery, all-caps social media post from the President himself, telling the Senate’s top Democrat to “GO TO HELL!”
This public blow-up is more than just failed political theater. It is a raw display of the constitutional tug-of-war between a President’s power to staff his government and Congress’s power over the nation’s finances.
‘GO TO HELL!’: The Deal is Off
For hours on Saturday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer were locked in tense but productive negotiations. On the table was a classic Washington deal.
Republicans wanted to confirm a package of up to 60 of President Trump’s nominees for various government posts before leaving town. In exchange, Democrats wanted the White House to unfreeze billions of dollars in congressionally-approved funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and for foreign aid.
Then, the President weighed in.
“This demand is egregious and unprecedented, and would be embarrassing to the Republican Party if it were accepted. It is political extortion, by any other name. Tell Schumer… to GO TO HELL!” – President Donald Trump on Truth Social
With that post, the deal was dead. The Senate confirmed only seven minor nominees and promptly left for its month-long recess.
A Clash of Constitutional Powers
This failed negotiation was a bare-knuckle constitutional brawl, pitting two of the government’s most fundamental powers directly against each other.
On one side is the President’s power under Article II of the Constitution to nominate the officers who run the executive branch, and the Senate’s duty to provide its “Advice and Consent” on those nominations. President Trump and the Republican majority were trying to exercise this power to fill crucial government roles.
On the other side is Congress’s exclusive Article I “power of the purse.” The funds for the NIH and foreign aid had already been appropriated by law. The Trump administration was using its executive authority to freeze that spending.
“This was a bare-knuckle constitutional negotiation: the Senate Democrats were trading their ‘Consent’ on nominees in exchange for the President yielding on his control over funds Congress had already appropriated.”
The Democrats were using their procedural ability to slow down the confirmation process as leverage to force the President to release the money that Congress had allocated.
The Blame Game
In the aftermath of the collapse, both sides were quick to blame the other.
Republicans, echoing the President, accused Senator Schumer of bad-faith negotiating and “extortion.” Senator Markwayne Mullin claimed that every time they got close to a deal, Schumer would up the price tag. “It was never about making a deal,” he said.
Senator Schumer, standing next to a poster-sized printout of Trump’s social media post, fired back that the President “threw in the towel in a fit of rage” and was unable to do the “basic work of negotiating.” Democrats claimed that Republicans were the ones moving the goalposts by trying to include more controversial, partisan nominees in the package.
An Escalation in the Confirmation Wars
The immediate consequence of this failure is that dozens of government posts – from ambassadorships to agency leadership roles – will remain vacant for at least another month, slowing the work of the federal government.
The long-term consequence, however, is likely to be a significant escalation of the partisan wars over nominations.
Republicans are now openly threatening to change the Senate’s rules in September to make it easier to confirm nominees with a simple majority, a move that would further erode the rights of the minority party.
The era of the pre-recess “gentlemen’s agreement” for confirming non-controversial nominees appears to be over. It has been replaced by open constitutional warfare, where every nominee and every dollar is a potential bargaining chip in a larger political battle.