Senate turns to nominations marathon

The Senate on Monday will begin the long slog of considering 23 of President Obama’s executive and judicial nominations.

The Senate spent nine hours on Saturday in procedural votes to set up cloture and confirmation votes for the 12 judicial nominations and 11 executive nominations.

{mosads}Democrats cheered Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) decision to block the Senate from delaying votes on a government funding bill until Monday because it allowed them to file cloture Saturday on a dozen more nominations than they originally planned to complete before the end of the year.

“We appreciate the opportunity Sen. Cruz provided us to start voting on these nominees Monday instead of Wednesday — the end result will likely be that we confirm more nominees than we would have if Sen. Cruz had not plunged into the breach,” said Adam Jentleson, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) spokesperson.

The first of the nominations being considered are also some of the most controversial — Sarah Saldana to be assistant secretary of Homeland Security and Vivek Hallegere Murthy to be surgeon general.

Reid said there will be four votes on Monday starting at 5:30 p.m. The first two will be cloture and confirmation of Murthy. The other two are cloture votes on Daniel Santos to be a member of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and Frank Rose to be an assistant secretary of State.

It’s unclear how much time Republicans will be willing to yield back on all of the other nominations — they oppose most of them, but are motivated to get home to their families for the holidays. Democrats are hoping to reach a unanimous consent agreement to quickly clear several of the nominees.

Reid has said he also wants to complete work on the tax extenders bill and possibly the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act before the 113th Congress ends.

House members left town Thursday night after passing the $1.1 trillion government funding bill.