The only thing that’s harder to beat than the heat in D.C. is the clock. While senators try to plow through nominees on their side of the Capitol — against a brick wall of bullheaded Democrats — the question on everyone’s minds is how much longer Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is willing to keep his chamber in session. Both sides have begrudgingly gone along with Donald Trump’s request to slog through the hires that require Senate approval, but time is ticking on the five-week stretch of campaigning most have hoped to do at home.

Conservatives, though, seem surprisingly willing to forgo or postpone their trips to the beach, insisting that if this is the game Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants to play, they’re game. “The Senate can’t have it both ways,” Utah’s Mike Lee (R) argued on X. “[We have] no business taking a summer vacation without doing our job.” If Democrats are going to throw “every procedural roadblock in the way of President Trump’s nominees,” he insists, then they should have to suffer for it. “Let’s cancel recess and keep working.”

Some of the greybeards, like Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), are more than willing to suffer through the 100-degree days and beat Schumer at his own game. “Trump needs his administration in place,” he stressed. Make everyone go the distance. For his part, the new majority leader is open to keeping the lights on deeper into August. “I think it’s fair to say that we’re going to keep the pressure on the Democrats to stay here until they either cooperate — or we’re just going to grind it out and do it the old-fashioned way.”

Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville (R), who knows plenty about wearing down the opposition on the field and in Congress, could only shake his head. Some of the Democrats, he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Wednesday, “[are] trying to be as hard-headed as they possibly can. They still have the Donald Trump syndrome.” But let’s face it, he pointed out, “Chuck Schumer is between a rock and a hard place. [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.] is thinking of running for his seat. If she runs,” the legendary ball coach warned, “she’ll beat him into the ground.”

So part of his strategy, he thinks, “is trying to act like … a far-left Democrat, which, he is, by the way.” But Tuberville reminded everyone, “he showed that one crack in the armor” by voting to keep the government open — a decision that made him an instant target with his own disgruntled base. Now, by refusing to budge on the president’s nominees, Schumer is trying to prove that he’s standing up to Trump. To counteract that, the Alabaman said, his party has brainstormed all kinds of ideas, from changing the rules or various things. But frankly, Tuberville shrugged, “What I’m for is just staying up here and going 24 hours a day for the next 30 days. Just sleep in your office and go vote, because if they want to play hardball, we’d better learn to play with them. And if we don’t do that, and we give in to them, we’re going to have huge problems in the long run.”

Just how disruptive are Democrats being? According to Tuberville’s Montana colleague, Steve Daines (R), this is “an unprecedented level of obstruction” that’s bottlenecking about 150 of the president’s nominees. “This is an all-time low watermark,” he lamented to Perkins on Tuesday’s show. “We’ve never seen this kind of opposition. In fact, President Trump … is the first president to go this many days — virtually six months into his administration — without a single nomination via consent or agreement with the Democrats.” For comparison’s sake, about 60% of Joe Biden’s nominees were approved with help from Republicans. That means, Perkins chimed in, that what Schumer’s party is doing is using up hours and hours of debate time, even though they know these men and women will ultimately get confirmed by a simple Republican majority.

Obviously, the point is to stop Trump, to “throw sand in the gears every chance they have.” But, Daines pointed out, “we’ve actually been the most productive U.S. Senate under John Thune’s leadership. … We’ve cast more votes, advanced more legislation, gotten more nominations through the old-fashioned way. … But the problem is, there’s some 1,100 political nominations at any given time for any president.” And this, Daines reiterated, “[is] the worst we’ve ever seen. Zero cooperation.”

Of course, one silver lining of the extended stay in D.C. is that it’s given Republicans time to make some headway in the painstaking appropriations process. Although the Senate is still behind the House, Thune is keeping his fingers crossed that he can actually pass one of the budgets on the floor this week. There’s been some talk of bundling a few bills together to keep the process moving, but it will depend on timing and goodwill.

Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) was surprisingly hopeful about the headway the Senate is making. “I am optimistic that we will get most of the bills — but not all of them — finished by Oct. 1 and into conference [with the House],” she said. Although the White House is pushing for another continuing resolution, both Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) have been adamant that it’s time to get back to governing the way Congress was intended.

“What I’ve said is … let us get back to regular order on appropriations and actually start doing that again,” the Senate majority leader underscored. “That, to me, is the course we’re on right now. We ought to play that out.”

In the meantime, as eager as both parties are to get home, the grind of the Senate goes on. And as far as some conservatives are concerned, that’s just the price of being in power. “We have to fix our government and give this president the government that he deserves,” Senator Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) insisted to Perkins Thursday. “He, after all, did win the election.”