Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cancelled the August recess Tuesday, but not without weeks of pressure from his Senate colleagues.
A group of 16 Republican senators had sent McConnell a letter in May urging him to keep them working full days, weekends and give them no break until they got the budget done this summer.
The group of senators ramped up the pressure with media interviews about their effort right before McConnell’s announcement.
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“This is the second time we have done this. Last time we had 12 senators on the republican side send a letter to leadership that said we are willing to stay here and work to get the funding done and to get the nominees done. So they kept us here in the August break and four days into the first week the minority party gave us 77 nominees and prior to that we only had 44 all year,” Georgia Sen. David Perdue told The Daily Caller.
Perdue added that there are 278 nominees waiting to be confirmed right now.
“By canceling the break, you might put a little pressure on the democrats and maybe they will stop obstructing nominations,” Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson told TheDC.