Georgia State University assistant professor and former House Oversight Committee staffer Todd Phillips laid this out in a Prospect piece earlier this month. Any 30 senators can force a CRA resolution onto the floor, with a required ten hours of debate time. These resolutions would need the president’s signature, and nearly all of them wouldn’t even get the Republican votes necessary to pass the Senate. But according to Senate procedure, they have to be dealt with if enough senators force them onto the floor. They must be debated and voted upon ahead of other Senate business if brought up for consideration. This means that Democrats can tie up the Senate floor for upwards of ten hours with any single CRA resolution.
Democrats could go back in time to invalidate prior agency actions.
The deregulatory Trump administration isn’t writing a whole lot of rules, limiting the raw material for these kinds of votes. But the Republican vote on EPA waivers just widely expanded the options for a CRA resolution. If the Department of Health and Human Services grants a state waiver for changes to its Medicaid program, or if the U.S. Department of Agriculture does the same for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Democrats could write resolutions to overturn such waivers. If the Federal Communications Commission issues a broadcast license, or the Justice Department approves a merger, or if the Securities and Exchange Commission decides to defer a prosecution in an investor protection case, Senate Democrats could challenge it. If the Department of Defense inks a contract for a new weapons system or any other item for procurement, they could challenge that, too. Any decision to redirect funds, change the terms of grants, or make practically any decision at all could, under the theory just enshrined into the Senate rulebook by Republicans, lead to a CRA resolution and ten hours of debate.
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The bottom line is this: If you found something like 1,000 current or former agency actions—a reasonable number considering all the work executive branch agencies do—you would probably have enough to keep the Senate debating and voting on CRA resolutions through the duration of this Congress.
That means the Senate would never have the ability to take up executive branch or judicial nominations, or legislation like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that recently passed the House. Senate Democrats could put the chamber into permanent gridlock, and thereby save 14 million people from losing their Medicaid coverage, save millions more from loss of SNAP benefits, while also forcing the 2017 Trump tax cuts to expire. That’s the level of hardball that can be played here.
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