Despite the ongoing government shutdown and opposition from Democrats, Senate Republicans are working to deliver on President Donald Trump’s agenda and staff his second administration. On Tuesday evening, GOP senators confirmed 107 individuals Trump nominated to various positions. Senate Republicans used what has been nicknamed the “nuclear option,” allowing them to confirm sub-cabinet-level administration nominees with a simple majority vote along party lines, rather than the more controversial option of recess appointments, which would have allowed Trump to appoint agency officials, federal prosecutors, diplomats, and other senior administration personnel without Senate approval.

Democrats have been holding up Trump administration personnel confirmations for months; some nominees confirmed Tuesday were submitted to the Senate as early as January. Senate Republicans, therefore, opted for a rule change in the upper chamber of Congress, allowing them to confirm limitless swaths of nominees with only a simple majority. Tuesday’s spate of confirmations also means that the second Trump administration has broken the record of previous presidential administrations for the number of confirmed nominees by the same time in the president’s terms. For example, the first Trump administration had only 183 nominees confirmed by this time, and the Biden administration had 201. The Senate has confirmed 298 nominees for the second Trump administration.

GOP senators confirmed 24 ambassadors, 14 U.S. attorneys, and a host of Justice Department officials and agency and department heads. Some of the more noteworthy confirmations made include former Republican Senate candidate and football star Herschel Walker as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, White House Office of Personnel Director Sergio Gor as U.S. ambassador to India, U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) veteran Brandon Judd as U.S. ambassador to Chile, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) veteran Paul Atkins as chairman of the regulatory agency, former Pan Am Railways president and fifth-generation railroader David Fink as chief of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), former Amazon road and transportation safety expert David Keeling as assistant secretary at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and longtime Republican operative and consultant Wayne Palmer as assistant secretary at the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).

Last month, the Senate used the “nuclear option” to confirm a swath of nearly 50 Trump nominees, including former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece and Callista Gingrich, former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See and the wife of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, as U.S. ambassador to both Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Tuesday’s swath of confirmations means that 26 more Trump nominees await confirmation: 16 to the executive branch and 10 to the federal judiciary.

Family Research Council’s Quena González, senior director for Government Affairs, tried to put the GOP’s agenda in perspective. 

“While it’s a positive development that Senate Republicans are meeting the Democrats’ unprecedented intransigence with resolve, the filibuster, which serves as a minority party’s main check on the majority, regardless of who is in power, continues to be whittled away,” he cautioned. “Many conservative Senate institutionalists wish that Senate Republicans had, instead, forced Democrats’ hand by holding back-to-back-to-back debates and votes on each nominee individually. If Democrats insist on withholding time agreements to limit debate time on each nominee, they could be forced to stay in Washington on nights and weekends as the nominees are processed through regular order, albeit slowly,” he told The Washington Stand. “The Senate is famous for only working Tuesday through Thursday morning, so working over the weekend would arguably be the real nuclear option!”

As González warned, “Republicans are right to finally begin clearing the backlog of Trump nominees, but the precedent of further weakening the filibuster will come back to haunt them when Democrats are back in power and once again resume routinely pushing ideologically radical nominees. Republicans’ ability to raise objections and force individual, difficult debates and votes on some bad nominees in the future has been, for better or for worse, sacrificed in this maneuver,” he concluded.