How Senate Confirmation Works: Committee to Floor

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The President of the United States cannot fill the government alone. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution says the president shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate shall appoint, ambassadors, judges, and other senior officers. That phrase is the whole basis of the confirmation system. It covers Cabinet secretaries, agency heads, ambassadors, federal prosecutors, and every federal judge.

What the Constitution does not say is how the Senate should go about giving or withholding that consent. Those rules are the Senate’s own, and the Senate has changed them repeatedly in the last fifteen years. Understanding the current process means understanding both the steps and the recent history.

Step one: the nomination

The president formally transmits a nomination to the Senate. It is then referred to whichever committee has jurisdiction over that office. A nominee for attorney general goes to the Judiciary Committee. Nominees to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Department of Labor go to the health and labor committee. A nominee for director of national intelligence goes to the Intelligence Committee.

Step two: the committee

Before anything public happens, the nominee completes a detailed questionnaire, a financial disclosure, and a background investigation. Then comes a confirmation hearing, at which senators question the nominee under oath, usually in rounds of a few minutes each. Senators may also submit written questions afterward.

Finally the committee holds a committee vote on whether to send the nomination to the full Senate. This stage is more powerful than it looks, for two reasons.

The first is arithmetic. Committee margins are narrower than the Senate’s. The Judiciary Committee splits twelve to ten, so a single Republican voting no would stop a Republican president’s nominee before the full Senate ever saw the name. When Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, was nominated for the permanent job in June 2026, attention immediately focused on two Republicans, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Each is a potential swing vote, and either one could end the nomination alone.

The second is scheduling. The committee chair decides when, and whether, a vote happens. Chairman Chuck Grassley postponed the Blanche vote from 23 July to 30 July, with his office describing the delay as standard practice after several Republicans were absent. The same week, the health committee postponed its vote on Erica Schwartz, nominated to lead the CDC, because its chairman said a family emergency had left too few Republicans present. Neither nomination was defeated. Both simply did not move. A chair who never schedules a vote can end a nomination without anyone having to vote against it.

Step three: the floor

A nomination reported out of committee goes onto the Executive Calendar, the list of business awaiting floor action. Getting there guarantees nothing. The majority leader decides what to call up, and any senator may place a hold, a notice of objection that does not block a nomination outright but forces the leadership to spend scarce floor time overcoming it.

To bring a nomination to a final vote, the Senate first votes on cloture, which closes debate. Cloture is not confirmation. It only clears the way. After cloture there is a period of post-cloture debate, and then the confirmation vote itself. Both cloture and confirmation now require a simple majority.

The nomination of Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence shows the pattern. The Intelligence Committee approved him nine to eight on 21 July 2026. The full Senate voted fifty-one to forty-three on 27 July to advance him, a party-line vote, with the final confirmation vote expected the following day.

Why the filibuster no longer applies

A filibuster is the use of unlimited debate to prevent a vote. For most of the twentieth century, ending one required three-fifths of the Senate, which in practice meant sixty votes. That threshold applied to nominations as well as to legislation, and it gave the minority real leverage.

It no longer does, because of four changes made by what is called the nuclear option: altering the rules or their interpretation by simple majority, rather than by the two-thirds vote that formally amending Senate rules would require.

In November 2013, Senate Democrats reinterpreted the rules so that cloture on any nomination except to the Supreme Court needed only a majority. In April 2017, Senate Republicans extended that to Supreme Court nominations. In April 2019, the Senate cut post-cloture debate for most nominations from thirty hours to two. In September 2025, Senate Republicans went further, voting fifty-three to forty-five to allow the Senate to confirm an unlimited number of executive branch nominees en bloc, meaning in a single grouped vote. The first use came on 19 September 2025, when forty-eight nominees were confirmed at once.

The 2025 change has limits worth knowing. It applies only to executive branch nominees subject to the two-hour debate rule. Judicial nominees, Cabinet nominees, and Supreme Court nominees are excluded and still move one at a time, with Cabinet and Supreme Court nominees still carrying thirty hours of post-cloture consideration. This is why Blanche, Schwartz, and Clayton each require an individual fight while hundreds of lower-level officials do not.

Each change was made by one party over the objections of the other, and each was defended as a response to obstruction by the other side. Both parties have now used the tool. Whether the cumulative effect has been to restore a functioning process or to remove a meaningful check is genuinely disputed.

Serving without confirmation

None of this explains how a government keeps operating while positions sit empty. The answer is the acting official, someone performing the duties of an office without having been confirmed to it.

The Federal Vacancies Reform Act, usually called the Vacancies Act, governs this. It limits who may serve and for how long. The ordinary limit is 210 days from the date the office became vacant. Crucially, it also allows an acting officer to continue serving while a first or second nomination to that office is pending in the Senate, no matter how long the Senate takes. The statute states that actions taken by someone serving outside these rules have no force or effect and cannot be ratified afterward.

The practical consequences are visible right now. Blanche has run the Justice Department as acting attorney general since 2 April 2026 and is now nominated for the permanent role, which keeps his clock running. Keith Sonderling has been acting Secretary of Labor since April, when Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned, and is likewise now nominated. At the CDC, the 210-day clock expired in March 2026 with no nominee; the department kept Jay Bhattacharya performing the director’s duties without the title, saying it believed that arrangement lawful under a separate authority.

There is an obvious tension here. The Senate’s power exists so that one person cannot staff the executive branch unilaterally. But an official can run a department for a year or more while a nomination sits unresolved, and submitting a nomination is itself what extends the permission to serve. Critics of the arrangement argue this inverts the point of advice and consent. Defenders argue that agencies must function and that the delay is caused by the Senate, not by the president.

One more option exists and is worth naming. A recess appointment lets a president fill a vacancy while the Senate is not in session, without any vote. Such an appointment expires at the end of the Senate’s next session. Since a 2014 Supreme Court decision narrowed when the Senate counts as being in recess, and because the Senate can hold brief sessions specifically to prevent one, recess appointments have become rare. They have not disappeared from the conversation.

Glossary

The advice and consent requirement appears in Article II, Section 2.
Ambassadors and judges are subject to advice and consent.

A nomination is referred to a committee as soon as it reaches the Senate.
The president sent the nomination to the Senate in June.

The confirmation hearing for the attorney general nominee ran across two days.
Senators may submit written questions after a confirmation hearing ends.

A nomination that loses the committee vote normally goes no further.
The chairman postponed the committee vote by one week.

Reaching the Executive Calendar does not guarantee a floor vote.
Dozens of names sat on the Executive Calendar for months.

A filibuster can no longer be used against a nomination.
The filibuster still applies to most ordinary legislation.

Cloture on a nomination now requires only a simple majority.
The Senate invoked cloture fifty-one to forty-three.

Post-cloture debate for most nominations was reduced to two hours in 2019.
Cabinet nominees still carry thirty hours of post-cloture debate.

Each recent use of the nuclear option has made confirmation faster.
Both parties have now used the nuclear option on nominations.

The Senate confirmed forty-eight nominees en bloc in September 2025.
Judicial nominees may not be confirmed en bloc.

Both cloture and confirmation now need only a simple majority.
A simple majority of fifty-one is enough in a full Senate.

The cloture vote on the intelligence nominee was a party-line vote.
A party-line vote in committee tells you the floor fight will be close.

On a committee split twelve to ten, a single swing vote decides everything.
Two senators were treated as the swing votes on the nomination.

A hold does not block a nomination outright but forces the majority to spend floor time.
One senator placed a hold on every nominee from the department.

An acting official can run a department for months while a nomination is pending.
The department was led by an acting official for most of the year.

The Vacancies Act sets a normal limit of 210 days.
Under the Vacancies Act, unlawful actions cannot be ratified later.

A recess appointment expires at the end of the following Senate session.
Recess appointments have become rare since 2014.

Discussion Questions

Should the Senate be able to block a president’s choice of staff at all?
Is it fair that one committee chair can stop a nomination by not scheduling a vote?
Was ending the filibuster for nominations a good change or a bad one?
Does it matter that both parties have used the nuclear option?
Should judges be treated differently from agency heads in this process?
What do you think of confirming forty-eight people in one vote?
Is an acting official who has served a year still temporary?
How does your own country appoint senior officials? Is anyone able to say no?
Should there be a deadline after which the Senate must vote on a nomination?
Why might a senator vote for a nominee they dislike?
What would you ask a nominee if you had five minutes?
Imagine you are the one undecided senator on a committee split evenly. How would you decide?

How Senate Confirmation Works, From Committee Vote to Cloture to the Floor