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Dec 12, 2025

Senate Republicans Advance Massive Trump Nominee Package-lllllllllllllllllllll

Trump announced Bragdon’s nomination on social media in August and highlighted his previous clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Bragdon told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Trump called him to congratulate him and said “that Justice Thomas spoke highly of me.”

Democrats and progressive groups opposed Bragdon’s confirmation, citing a Geocities website he operated while in college from 1997 to 2000 where he posted political viewpoints.

The website included statements describing abortion as “wrong because person or not, a fetus has just as much right to life as an infant does,” and argued that “there is enough of a logical link between the death penalty and deterrence to call for an increased use of the death penalty.”

He also wrote that “our welfare system should be a safety net and not a hammock.”

The progressive advocacy group Alliance for Justice said confirming Bragdon “would legitimize his extreme rhetoric and pave the way for dangerous shifts in the rule of law.”

Senate Republicans pushed through the first procedural hurdle Wednesday as they moved to confirm nearly 100 of President Donald Trump’s nominees. The vote sets up a later decision on 97 of Trump’s picks and marks the third time Republicans have advanced a large bloc of nominees since changing Senate confirmation rules in September.

The final confirmation vote on this group is expected next week, Fox News reported.

If Republicans complete the process, they will have confirmed more than 400 of Trump’s nominees during the first year of his second term.

That total would place Trump well ahead of former President Joe Biden, who had 350 nominees confirmed at the same point in his presidency.

The nominees include former Rep. Anthony D’Esposito of New York for inspector general at the Department of Labor and two selections for the National Labor Relations Board, James Murphy and Scott Mayer, as well as others across nearly every federal agency.

Murphy and Mayer were included in the package after Trump fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, a move the Supreme Court upheld earlier this year.

This is Republicans’ second effort to advance the package after Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado objected last week in an attempt to delay the process.

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