The Senate Hold Explained, How One Senator Can Slow a Nominee for Months

The most powerful procedural tool in the United States Senate is not in the Constitution, not in the Senate's standing rules, and not in any statute. It is a custom. It has no official form, no fee and, in the old days, no requirement that anyone know whose it was. Washington has produced many wonders, but a rule that exists only because everyone agrees to pretend it does is surely among the finest.

It is called a hold, and a single senator can use it to freeze a nomination for months. Let me explain how that works, who has used it and when it is a legitimate act and when it is just a senator hiding behind a clipboard.

First, the thing the Senate runs on

To understand a hold, you have to understand what the Senate does all day, and the answer is: it asks for permission. The Senate has 100 members, each of whom has the right to speak, offer amendments and make motions. If every one of them insisted on every right on every matter, the chamber would never finish a day. So the Senate has long worked by unanimous consent, a request made on the floor by a senator, usually the majority leader, to do something by skipping the formal procedure.

"I ask unanimous consent that the vote occur at 5:30" is the most common sentence in the chamber. If no senator objects, the Senate agrees, and the thing is done. Unanimous consent agreements set the schedule, limit the debate, fix the order of amendments and allow nominees to be confirmed in groups. They save an enormous amount of floor time, and the Senate has only so many hours in the year.

Now notice the weakness in the arrangement. Unanimous means unanimous. If one senator says "I object," the request fails, and the Senate must fall back on the formal procedure. That is the hinge on which the hold swings.

What a hold is

A hold is a notice to the party leadership that a senator intends to object to a request for unanimous consent to take up a particular nomination or bill. That is the whole thing. It is not a vote. It is not a formal motion. It does not appear in the rulebook. It is a message, usually a letter or a phone call to the majority or minority leader, saying: if you try to move this by consent, I will object.

Think of it as a polite way of saying "I object" in advance, so that the leader does not waste the floor's time by asking. The leader, who runs the schedule, then has to choose between honoring the hold, by not even bringing the item up by consent, or calling the senator's bluff and forcing the long way around.

The long way around: cloture

Here is where the real cost comes in. If a senator will not consent to a quick vote, the majority can still move the matter, but it has to use the formal route, which for most things is called cloture, the procedure under Senate Rule XXII for ending debate. The Senate adopted the first cloture rule in 1917. Since 1975 it has required three-fifths of the senators duly chosen and sworn, which is 60 of 100, to end debate on most matters.

The process takes time. The majority leader files a cloture motion. The motion ripens after an intervening day. The Senate votes. If the vote succeeds, there is a period of further debate, which for decades could run up to 30 hours, and then the final vote.

The rules have changed for nominations. In 2013, the Senate set a precedent that cloture on most executive branch and lower-court judicial nominations needs only a simple majority, and in 2017 it extended that to Supreme Court nominations. In 2019, it set another precedent that cut the post-cloture time to two hours for most executive nominees below the Cabinet level and for district judges. Those changes lowered the price of the long way around. They did not eliminate it.

Let me show you the arithmetic, labelled as a hypothetical so that nobody mistakes it for a schedule. Suppose that each nomination forced through the formal route consumes about three hours of floor time, counting the cloture vote, the two hours of post-cloture debate and the confirmation vote. Suppose a senator's blanket hold forces that route on 100 nominees. That is 100 times 3, or 300 hours. Divide by eight-hour working days and you get 37.5 days of floor time, which is seven and a half five-day weeks in which the Senate does nothing else. And the Senate has to confirm well over a thousand positions across an administration. A hold is a tax on the Senate's most scarce resource, which is its time.

Why leaders honor holds

So why would a leader respect a hold when he could simply file for cloture? The answer is that the leader is not only a leader but also a manager of 100 colleagues, every one of whom will, at some point, want the favor of consent for something of his own. A majority leader who runs over one senator's hold this week will find that senator, and his friends, unwilling to cooperate next week. The Senate works on reciprocity, and the leader's schedule is made of favors.

There is also the matter of the floor itself. The majority leader has the right of first recognition, which means that by custom the presiding officer calls on the leader before any other senator. That gives him control of the agenda, but only so long as the other senators permit the chamber to operate smoothly. The hold is the reminder that the leader's control of the agenda is, in the end, a courtesy.

What the Constitution says, and does not say

Now for the constitutional anchor, because a hold is a custom, and it matters what the custom is attached to.

Article II, Section 2 says the president "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States." The Senate's role is advice and consent. In Federalist 76, Alexander Hamilton explained that the point of requiring the Senate's agreement was to serve as a check on the president's choices, a restraint that would discourage the appointment of unfit persons. The Founders wanted the Senate to look at nominees, not to bury them.

Article I, Section 5 says that "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings." That is the source of the Senate's power to make rules, including the unwritten ones. The hold has no more claim to constitutional status than a seating chart, but the Senate is entitled to run itself as it sees fit.

So here is the tension. The Constitution gives the Senate the power to consent to nominees. The Senate's own customs let one member delay that consent for months. Those two facts are not necessarily in conflict, because delay is not denial. But they are not the same, either, and a conservative who respects both the Senate's autonomy and the president's right to staff the executive branch has to ask where the line is.

Sunshine: the disclosure rules

For decades, holds were secret. A senator could place a hold, and nobody, including the nominee, would know whose it was. A secret hold was the Senate's version of an anonymous letter, and it had the usual vices of anonymity: no accountability, no explanation, and no way for the nominee or the public to address the objection.

Congress began to address that in 2007. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of that year required a senator who places a hold to submit notice of it in the Congressional Record within a short period, and the Senate tightened the disclosure practices again in 2011, when it required disclosure within two legislative days of an objection. The details have changed over time, and some senators have found ways around them, such as having a colleague object on the floor. But the direction is clear: a hold is supposed to be public, and a senator who places one is supposed to be willing to say so.

If you want to see a hold in the wild, the Congressional Record at Congress.gov is where such notices are printed, and a nomination's page on the same site shows its status and action history.

Both parties do it

If you have followed the news from one side or the other, you may have the impression that holds are a weapon only the other party uses. The record says otherwise.

In February 2010, Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama placed holds on dozens of Obama administration nominees, in a dispute over projects he wanted for his own state, including an Air Force tanker competition, and released most of them within days. In early 2010 Republican Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky objected to a unanimous consent request to extend unemployment benefits, forcing a brief lapse; that was a bill, not a nominee, but it shows how one voice can stop the Senate's consent machinery. Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, as reported at the time, placed a hold in 2010 on the nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Jacob Lew, to protest the administration's offshore drilling moratorium.

In 2017 and 2018, Senate Democrats, in the minority, declined to give consent to speed up President Trump's nominees, which forced the majority to file cloture on an unusually large number of them. That was not a hold in the classic sense, but it was the same lever, pulled by a whole caucus. In 2021, Republican Senator Ted Cruz placed holds on State Department nominees over a pipeline sanctions dispute. And in 2023, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville placed a hold on military promotions over a Defense Department policy, which stretched across months and affected hundreds of nominations before he lifted most of it in December.

I list these so that nobody in the audience has the pleasure of thinking the practice belongs to the other team. It belongs to the Senate.

The strongest argument for the hold

A fair account has to give the defenders their due, and the best defense is this: The hold is the individual senator's last line of defense. The Senate is the body in which a minority, even a minority of one, can force the majority to pause. A nominee for a lifetime judgeship or a powerful executive post deserves scrutiny, and a senator who thinks the scrutiny is inadequate has a right to demand more. Without the hold, a leader could rush through nominees by a procedural ruse. And the hold sometimes works: it extracts information, a commitment or a policy change that the senator could not obtain any other way.

That is a serious case, and it accords with the Senate's reputation as a chamber that protects the minority. A conservative, who reads the history of republics with an eye for how majorities abuse power, ought to be reluctant to abolish a tool that slows a majority down. The sensible response to the problem of holds is not to eliminate them but to ask when they are legitimate.

The test: leverage or obstruction

Here is the test I would apply, in numbered form.

1. Is it public? A senator who is willing to defend his hold in the open is using a legitimate tool. A secret hold treats the Senate like a private club.
2. Is it specific? A hold on one nominee, tied to a concern about that nominee's qualifications or conduct, is the Senate performing its advice-and-consent role. A blanket hold on every nominee in a department, over a dispute that has nothing to do with them, treats the nominees as hostages.
3. Is there a demand that can be met? A hold that says "answer this question" or "release these documents" invites resolution. A hold with no stated purpose is simply delay.
4. Is it limited in time? The Founders contemplated that the Senate would consider nominations and decide them. Delay in order to extract an answer is bargaining. Delay for its own sake is a refusal to do the job.
5. Does the senator accept the consequences? If a senator is prepared to explain his hold at home, in public, to the voters who sent him, he is probably using it for a reason.

By that test, a public, specific, time-limited hold tied to a real concern is principled leverage. A secret, blanket, open-ended hold used to extract something unrelated is obstruction. And the harder cases fall somewhere in between, which is exactly why the voters need to read the record.

I would add a point from the other side of the ledger. The same Senate that likes to defend the hold also lets leaders and caucuses exploit it for ordinary political gain, and every party has used it that way when it was in the minority and complained about it when it was in the majority. A rule that both sides use and both sides condemn is a rule that deserves a hard look. The majority-vote threshold for nominations, discussed in The Filibuster After the Midterm, Why Sixty Votes Now Protect the Outnumbered, has reduced the cost of the hold, and I do not think the Senate's reputation as the world's greatest deliberative body has suffered much for it.

How a family can use this

You do not need a seat in the Senate to use any of this. When you read that a nominee is "stalled in the Senate," you can find out why in about ten minutes. Look up the nomination at Congress.gov, read its action history, search the Congressional Record for a notice of a hold, and find out which senator placed it and what he or she says it is about. Then call that senator's office, or your own, and say what you think.

The same habit teaches you to read Washington. A great deal of what stops things in the capital is not a vote but a procedure, and the procedures are written down, or at least known. For how bills move or die before they get to the floor, see Schoolhouse Rock Left Out the Rules Committee, and That Is Where Bills Move. For what the opposite chamber's majority can and cannot do, see The Numbers That Run Congress, From 218 to 60 to 290 to 38 and Back. And for a satirical look at what happens when a majority can never be slowed, read If a Majority Could Never Be Slowed, a Satirical Tour of the 51-Vote Republic. The Senate that Hamilton described in Federalist 76 was supposed to be slow on purpose, and I think we should keep that. We should also ask the senators who slow it down to tell us why. A senator who pulls a lever should be able to say what it is attached to.

The case in brief

1. A hold is an informal notice that a senator will object to unanimous consent on a nomination or bill; it is in neither the Constitution nor the Senate's rules.
2. The Senate runs on unanimous consent, so one objection forces the formal route of cloture, and each nominee forced through it costs hours of floor time.
3. Leaders honor holds because the Senate runs on reciprocity, and disclosure rules adopted in 2007 and after were meant to make holds public.
4. Both parties have used holds, from Shelby and Landrieu in 2010 to Cruz in 2021 and Tuberville in 2023.
5. A hold is principled leverage when it is public, specific, tied to a demand that can be met and limited in time, and it is obstruction when it is secret, blanket and open-ended.

What you can do: choose one pending nomination at Congress.gov, read its action history, and write your senator a two-sentence note saying whether the Senate should vote on it.