President Trump was elected by a large majority. Congress (particularly the Senate) does not seem to understand that. The Senate has been blocking the SAVE Act which 80 percent of Americans support, but it has also been blocking President Trump’s nominations.

On Tuesday, Amuse on X noted that the Senate has been in pro forma session rather than go into recess and let the President make recess appointments.

The article at Amuse on X reports:

The pattern, until recently, was easy to describe. Pro forma sessions, when used to prevent recess appointments, were always an opposition-party weapon. Senate Democrats used them to block George W. Bush. Senate Republicans used them to block Barack Obama. Each side learned the tactic from the other and used it to constrain a president of the rival party. By the standards of American constitutional practice, that was ordinary politics. The branches fought, the parties fought, and the alignment was predictable. The president and his Senate majority stood on one side. The opposition Senate used scheduling to deny him appointments power on the other.

Donald Trump broke that pattern, although not by his own action. The Senate broke it for him. In August 2017, Scripps News reported that Senator Mitch McConnell’s Senate held nine pro forma sessions during the August work period, sessions which by their structure prevented President Trump from making recess appointments during a stretch of weeks in which his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, appeared at risk of being replaced. Axios and the Voice of America described the calendar in similar terms. The legal effect of the schedule was unmistakable. By breaking the long summer break into intervals of less than four days at a time, the chamber denied the president a constitutionally qualifying recess. The Republican majority’s calendar, not the Democratic minority, was what made the difference.

The article concludes:

This is not a high-minded defense of the Senate. It is obstruction wrapped in procedural Latin. A Republican leader who genuinely believed in advice and consent would be moving heaven and earth to schedule the floor time, change the rules where needed, and confirm the President’s people. He would not be reading scripts into an empty chamber for the express, well-understood purpose of denying the President a recess. Donald Trump did not invent this constitutional collision. He is simply the first president in American history to absorb its full weight from his own side, after the Supreme Court made the relevant law clear, and at the precise moment the voters had handed his party the unified government that was supposed to make obstruction like this impossible. The voters did their part. Leader Thune has not done his.

It’s time to replace John Thune.