The Senate is on track to confirm Stephen Miran to the Federal Reserve Board later tonight, allowing him to be sworn in just in time for the Fed’s two-day meetings on interest rates.
That means Miran, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, will have an immediate say in the Fed’s decision-making at a crucial time. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has suggested that interest rates are likely to be cut as weakness in the U.S. labor market looms.
Miran’s vote wouldn’t sway the decision to reduce rates either way, but he’s likely to advocate for a larger cut by the central bank.
We’ll be watching these meetings closely, and we’re sure President Donald Trump will have thoughts, too.
The Senate will hold a cloture vote on Miran’s nomination during the 5:30 p.m. vote series. Two hours after that vote, senators will vote on Miran’s confirmation.
New era for noms. It’s a big week for the Senate as Republicans are slated to confirm a bloc of 48 sub-Cabinet nominees on Thursday, the first “en bloc” confirmation under the chamber’s new rules.
And they’ll tee up the next bloc at the end of the week, as Republicans look to hit the ground running with the new rules.
Last week, GOP senators invoked the so-called “nuclear option” to allow the Senate to confirm an unlimited number of sub-Cabinet executive branch nominees in a single batch.
The move came in response to Senate Democrats’ unprecedented campaign to slow-walk Trump’s nominees, though the chamber’s confirmation process started deteriorating long before this year.
The first batch is centered on nominees who came out of committee with bipartisan support. They represent one-third of the current backlog of Trump nominations awaiting floor time on the Senate’s executive calendar.
Elsewhere on the nominations front, Senate GOP leaders sent 23 nominations back to committee last week, the vast majority of which are from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
This was done to head off potential Democratic objections to the use of proxy votes when the nominations were approved in committee. Nearly every Senate committee authorizes the use of proxy voting and there usually aren’t objections on the Senate floor. But this is another example of Senate Democrats playing hardball and forcing slowdowns.
The Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to re-vote those nominations on Wednesday. The group included Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
It’s looking unlikely that Waltz will be confirmed in time for the UN General Assembly, which begins in New York next week.
