WASHINGTON, DC — Senate Republican leaders are aggressively plowing through the confirmations of President Donald Trump’s cabinet officials, officially as of Wednesday afternoon surpassing the pace at which former President Barack Obama’s cabinet was confirmed in 2009.
The feat is all the more impressive given the fact that Republicans, with a 53-seat majority this year in the upper chamber of Congress, have less of a majority than Democrats did in 2009 at the beginning of Obama’s first term. Democrats actually began Obama’s first term with 60 seats in the U.S. Senate, a filibuster-proof supermajority. That formally faded later when Republican Scott Brown won a shocking special election victory in Massachusetts to break the Democrats’ supermajority. But they started with a filibuster-proof majority in the chamber, something neither party has been that close to since…
