WASHINGTON — The Senate, once again, was working into the early morning hours Friday with its new majority leader, Republican John Thune, setting the pace.
It wasn’t until just after 2 a.m. that the last of the senators had straggled into the chamber to cast their vote on the confirmation of retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The vote capped a grinding start to the year for the Senate that included several all-night floor sessions and — importantly for Thune — the quickest top-level Cabinet confirmation process in the past 20 years.
At the outset, however, such an outcome was far from assured. President Donald Trump was making demands that the new Senate leader be ready to put the chamber into recess so he could skip over the Senate confirmation process altogether. Faced with that prospect, Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said his message in conversations with the president was, “Let us do this the old-fashioned way and just use the clock and grind it out, and then we’ll see where we go from there.”
That approach has been successful allowing Thune to show Trump the Senate’s worth while also preserving its constitutional role in installing a president’s Cabinet. But the decision to push forward on even Trump’s most unconventional Cabinet nominees has also come at a cost.
Several Cabinet officials have been intimately involved in the early controversies of Trump’s second term, from discussing military plans on an unclassified Signal app chat to encouraging the Republican president to follow through with steep tariffs on trading partners.
GOP senators, many of whom still hold traditional Republican ideas, have often had to mount a response. The Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, last month initiated an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general into whether classified information was shared on Signal by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. And GOP senators more recently made a concerted effort to encourage Trump to negotiate trade deals with other nations rather than listen to advisers like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was adamant that tariffs were there to stay.
In an interview with The Associated Press shortly after Trump announced a pause on tariffs to most nations, Thune said the announcement showed the president is “responding to the feedback he’s given.”
“I think everybody wants to see him succeed with this, wants to see the country succeed and wants to make sure that we’re gauging and calibrating — as some of these major policy shifts are being made — the impacts that they have,” Thune added.
That balance — Thune’s supportive yet still cautious approach — has marked his early months working with a president with whom, until last year, he had a fraught relationship. So far, Trump and Thune have stayed on upbeat terms, but the stakes will only rise for Republicans in the coming months as they try to lift through Congress a massive package of tax breaks and spending cuts on party-line votes.
During Trump’s first term, it took barely a year — and some setbacks in Congress — before Trump began openly feuding with then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Discussing the reconciliation package as he sat in McConnell’s old leadership office, Thune stressed that for the GOP’s marquee legislation to work, “Everybody’s got to be rolling in the same direction. It takes a lot of teamwork.”
As Trump has entered office with practically total command of the Republican Party and an agenda to upend the federal government and its role in society, Thune acknowledged that Trump has been aggressive in his use of executive power. But he argued that it was no different from how previous presidents wanted to “take as much power as they possibly can,” pointing to President Joe Biden’s moves to cancel student debt and boost government food assistance.
“Our job is to do what we can to support the president and his agenda,” Thune said. “But, you know, be that important check and balance, too, that the Founders intended.”
Still, as Trump has blazed through constitutional norms with sweeping orders that endanger civil rights, government programs, the federal workforce and America’s relationship with allies, Republicans in Congress have stood by.
“We need Republicans to get off the sidelines, including the majority leader, and say, ’This is unacceptable behavior by any president,’” said Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat.
Kelly cited Trump’s disparagement of NATO and comments about taking over countries like Canada and Greenland and the Panama Canal. “The damage that Donald Trump is doing to our international reputation is not something we easily recover from,” he said.
Still, Kelly added that Thune “deserves some credit” for making the “mechanics of the Senate function well.”
Thune has been aggressive in trying to get the Senate to move faster through its votes. He noted that he had allowed one recent vote session to close before he had even had a chance to cast his vote because he was at the White House for a meeting.
It’s an incremental change in the Senate’s timing, but one that Thune, a former runner, hopes will contribute to the chamber becoming more active and deliberative in shaping the law. He won the leadership contest in part by pledging to allow individual senators to have more of a say in crafting and amending legislation.
So far, the Senate has also gained bipartisan support to pass bills that will increase prison penalties for fentanyl traffickers as well as mandate the detainment of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally and are accused of theft and violent crimes.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican who has been vocal about changes to the way legislation advances, said Thune has “done a great job,” although the Senate hasn’t had much of a chance to work on legislation.
“The truth of the matter,” he added, “is we’ve been consumed by confirmations.”
