A resolution notifying the President of the United States of the election of a Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the Senate.

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Bill ID: 119/sres/12
Last Updated: January 29, 2025

Sponsored by

Sen. Thune, John [R-SD]

ID: T000250

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The bill

A resolution notifying the President of the United States of the election of a Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the Senate.

SRES. 12, 119th Congress.

The sponsor

Sen. Thune, John [R-SD]

Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.

The money

$102,900 raised

20 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.

The alignment

55% match to Project 2025

This bill's text tracks the "Department of Homeland Security" section, p. 168-170 of the Mandate for Leadership.

Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law

Track this bill's progress through the legislative process

Latest Action

Submitted in the Senate, considered, and agreed to without amendment by Unanimous Consent. (consideration: CR S8; text: CR S8)

January 2, 2025

Introduced

Committee Review

Floor Action

📍 Current Status

Next: The full Senate will vote on whether to pass the bill.

✅

Passed Senate

🏛️

House Review

🎉

Passed Congress

🖊️

Presidential Action

⚖️

Became Law

📚 How does a bill become a law?

1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.

2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.

3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.

4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.

5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.

6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.

7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!

Bill Summary

(sigh) Oh joy, another thrilling episode of "Congressional Theater" for the masses. Let's dissect this masterpiece, shall we?

**Main Purpose & Objectives:** (rolls eyes) The main purpose of SRES 12 is to notify the President that the Senate has elected a new Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper. Wow, I bet the President was on the edge of their seat waiting for this earth-shattering news. The objective? To give the Senate an opportunity to pat themselves on the back for doing something, anything, while pretending to be productive.

**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** (chuckles) There are no provisions or changes to existing law here. This is a resolution, folks! A fancy way of saying "we're going to send a strongly worded letter to the President." The only thing that's changing is the name on the Sergeant at Arms' business cards.

**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** (sarcastic tone) Oh, this one's a real nail-biter. The affected parties are: 1) Jennifer A. Hemingway, the newly elected Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper, who will now have to deal with the crushing responsibility of... well, whatever it is they do; 2) The President, who will receive a notification that will undoubtedly be met with a resounding "meh"; and 3) The Senate, which gets to pretend like they're doing something important.

**Potential Impact & Implications:** (dramatic sigh) The potential impact of this resolution is... (pauses for comedic effect)... zero. Zilch. Nada. It's a non-binding, ceremonial exercise in bureaucratic busywork. But hey, at least it gives the Senate an excuse to hold a press conference and pretend like they're not completely useless.

Diagnosis: This bill is suffering from a severe case of "Legislative Ennui" – a disease characterized by a complete lack of substance or purpose. Symptoms include pointless resolutions, unnecessary notifications, and a general sense of apathy towards actual governance. Treatment? (shrugs) I'm a political analyst, not a miracle worker.

Related Topics

Congressional Rules & ProceduresFederal Budget & Appropriations
Generated using Llama 3.1 70B (Dr. Haus personality)

💰 Campaign Finance Network

Sen. Thune, John [R-SD]

Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle

Total Contributions
$102,900
15 donors
PACs
$0
Organizations
$0
Committees
$0
Individuals
$102,900

No PAC contributions found

No organization contributions found

No committee contributions found

1
BELL, RICHARD R
2 transactions
$16,800
2
NESS, LARRY F
2 transactions
$11,700
3
HARMS, DUANE D
2 transactions
$9,700
4
EVANS, MICHAEL
2 transactions
$8,400
5
POWELL, JESSE
1 transaction
$6,600
6
DUHAMEL, KATHARINE B
1 transaction
$6,600
7
DUHAMEL, WILLIAM F JR.
1 transaction
$6,600
8
BARATTA, JOSEPH
2 transactions
$6,600
9
MCINERNEY, PAULA G
1 transaction
$5,000
10
MILKEN, LOWELL J
1 transaction
$5,000
11
WHITE, ALAN B
1 transaction
$5,000
12
HARMS, JEFFREY D
1 transaction
$5,000
13
MARQUIS, BENJAMIN L
1 transaction
$3,300
14
MARQUIS, DARRELL L
1 transaction
$3,300
15
MARQUIS, DUSTIN L
1 transaction
$3,300

Donor Network - Sen. Thune, John [R-SD]

PACs
Organizations
Individuals
Politicians

Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.

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Showing 30 nodes and 20 connections (36 secondary connections hidden)

Total contributions: $102,900

Top Donors - Sen. Thune, John [R-SD]

Showing top 15 donors by contribution amount

15 Individuals

Project 2025 Policy Matches

This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.AI-enhanced analysis provides detailed alignment ratings.

Department of Homeland Security

Weak
Vector: 60%
Pages: 168-170AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"SRES 12 is a procedural Senate resolution about notifying the President of the election of the Sergeant at Arms; it does not address DHS missions such as securing coasts, transportation security, or political personnel reforms, though it tangentially touches on the protection of political leaders within the Senate."

Key themes:protection of political leadersSenate-confirmed leadershipinternal security oversight

— 136 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Secure our coasts and economic zones; l Protect political leaders, their families, and visiting heads of state or government; and l Oversee transportation security. OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY (SEC) In the next Administration, the Office of the Secretary should take on the fol- lowing key issues and challenges to ensure the effective operation of DHS. Expansion of Dedicated Political Personnel. The Secretary of Homeland Security is a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed political appointee, but for budgetary reasons, he or she has historically been unable to fund a dedi- cated team of political appointees. A key first step for the Secretary to improve front-office functions is to have his or her own dedicated team of political appoin- tees selected and vetted by the Office of Presidential Personnel, which is not reliant on detailees from other parts of the department, to help ensure the completion of the next President’s agenda. An Aggressive Approach to Senate-Confirmed Leadership Positions. While Senate confirmation is a constitutionally necessary requirement for appointing agency leadership, the next Administration may need to take a novel approach to the confirmations process to ensure an adequate and rapid transition. For example, the next Administration arguably should place its nominees for key positions into similar positions as “actings” (for example, putting in a person to serve as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner of CBP while that person is going through the confirmation process to direct ICE or become the Secretary). This approach would both guarantee implementation of the Day One agenda and equip the department for potential emergency situations while still honoring the confirmation requirement. The department should also look to remove lower-level but nevertheless important positions that currently require Senate confirmation from the confirmation requirement, although this effort would require legislation (and might also be mooted in the event of legisla- tion that closes portions of the department that currently have Senate-confirmed leadership). Clearer, More Durable, and Political-Only Line of Succession. Based on previous experience, the department needs legislation to establish a more durable but politically oriented line of succession for agency decision-making purposes. The ideal sequence for line of succession is certainly debatable, except that in cir- cumstances where a career employee holds a leadership position in the department, that position should be deemed vacant for line-of-succession purposes and the next eligible political appointee in the sequence should assume acting authority. Further, — 137 — Department of Homeland Security individuals wielding acting Secretary authority should have explicit authority to finalize agency actions, including regulations, to ensure that the department’s homeland security mission is fulfilled. Soft Closure of Unnecessary Offices. Pending a possible presidential deci- sion to shrink or eliminate DHS itself, the next Administration will still have the obligation to protect the homeland as required by law. The Secretary therefore can and should use his or her inherent, discretionary leadership authority to “soft close” ineffective and problematic corners of the department. While those corners are to be determined, the Secretary could shift personnel, funding, and opera- tional responsibility to mission-essential components of the department, including the Office of the Secretary itself. This effort not only would make the department more efficient, but also would support a legislative move to shrink or dismantle the department by showing that the agency can fulfill national security–critical functions without its current bloated bureaucracy. Restructuring and Redistribution of Career Personnel. To strengthen political decision-making and ensure that taxpayer dollars are being used legally and efficiently, the Secretary should make major changes in the distribution of career personnel throughout the department. For example, personnel from parts of the department undergoing soft closure could be redistributed to what will be workload-intensive corners of the department, including national security–critical and transparency functions. All personnel with law enforcement capacity should be removed immediately from office billets and deployed to field billets to maxi- mize law enforcement capacity. Compliance for Grants and Other Federal Funding. The next Adminis- tration should take steps to restore lawfulness and integrity to the department’s massive regimen of federal grant programs, most of which are managed and dis- tributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Secretary should direct FEMA to ensure that all FEMA-issued grant funding for states, localities, and private organizations is going to recipients who are lawful actors, can demon- strate that they are in compliance with federal law, and can show that their mission and actions support the broader homeland security mission. All applicants and potential recipients of such grant funding should be required to meet certain pre- conditions for eligibility (except for receipt of post-disaster or nonhumanitarian funding) or should simply be considered ineligible for funding. Such preconditions should include at least the following: l Certification by applicants that they comply with all aspects of federal immigration laws, including the honoring of all immigration detainers. l Certification by applicants that they are both registered with E-Verify and using E-Verify in a transparent and nonevasive manner. For states

Department of Defense

Minimal
Vector: 59%
Pages: 134-136AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"SRES 12 is a purely procedural Senate resolution notifying the President of the election of the Sergeant at Arms and contains no content related to defense exportability, FMS reform, or any Department of Defense objectives outlined in Project 2025."

— 101 — Department of Defense 1. Ensure that senior U.S. military leadership emphasizes exportability in the initial development of defense systems that are both available and interoperable with our partners and allies. 2. Create a funding mechanism to incentivize exportability in initial planning, which can be recouped after future FMS transactions. l End informal congressional notification. Informal congressional notification or “tiered review” is a hinderance to ensuring timely sales to our global partners. The tiered review process is not codified in law; it is merely a practice by which the Department of State provides a preview of prospective arms transfers before Congress is formally notified.9 1. End the tiered review process to eliminate at least 20 days from the FMS process. 2. Use the tiered review process only when unanimous congressional support is guaranteed in order to eliminate the “weaponization” by select Members of Congress that has prevented billions of dollars of arms sales from moving into formal congressional notification. l Minimize barriers to collaboration. The high cost of developing advanced defense platforms requires the United States to collaborate with key allies to minimize waste, complement strengths, and supplement our defense industrial base to create a system that is greater than that of the United States alone. 1. Enhance defense industrial base planning with partners to allow them to focus on niche areas where there are cost advantages for the United States. 2. Decrease International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) to facilitate trade with such allies as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. 3. Create opportunities to improve the health of the defense supply chain with added opportunities for partners and allies to contribute. l Reform the FMS contracting process. The contracting timeline for the FMS process is shockingly slow. On average, the DOD contracting timeline takes approximately 18 months because of slow bureaucratic processes and chronic understaffing.10 — 102 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 1. Immediately fund more contracting capacity in all services to decrease the contracting timeline and improve the delivery of defense articles to our global partners. 2. Rationalize and speed arms sales decision-making to preclude our enemies from exploiting bureaucratic slothfulness and allow us to manage the development of indigenous defense industrial bases. DOD PERSONNEL The men and women of America’s armed forces are the most critical component of our national defense strategy, but in recent years, they have been overextended, undervalued, and insufficiently resourced. Their families help them to carry the burden of service, but the assistance they receive is disproportionately less than the sacrifices they make. Young civilians who would thrive in a military environ- ment are disenfranchised when educators and influencers discourage them from learning about military service and preparing for the honor of wearing Ameri- ca’s uniform. The United States military is an extraordinary institution, staffed by exceptional people who have defended our nation and changed the course of history, but the Biden Administration, through word and deed, has treated the armed forces as just another place to work. We must restore our military to a place of honor and respect and recruit and retain the individuals who will meet the rigorous standards of excellence that are required for membership in the world’s greatest fighting force. Needed Reforms l Rescue recruiting and retention. Recruiting was the worst in 2022 that it has been in two generations and is expected to be even worse in 2023. Some of the problems are self-inflicted and ongoing. The recruiting problem is not service-specific: It affects the entire Joint Force. 1. Appoint a Special Assistant to the President who will maintain liaison with Congress, DOD, and all other interested parties on the issue of recruiting and retention. 2. Improve recruiting by suspending the use of the recently introduced MHS Genesis system that uses private medical records of potential recruits at Military Entrance Processing Stations (MEPS), creating unnecessary delays and unwarranted rejections.11 3. Improve military recruiters’ access to secondary schools and require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery

Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy

Minimal
Vector: 59%
Pages: 112-114AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"The bill concerns a Senate internal notification of an officer election and does not address federal personnel management, hiring freezes, performance-based layoffs, or bureaucracy reform outlined in Project 2025."

— 79 — Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy What is needed at the beginning is a freeze on all top career-position hiring to prevent “burrowing-in” by outgoing political appointees. Moreover, four fac- tors determine the order in which employees are protected during layoffs: tenure, veterans’ preference, seniority, and performance in that order of importance. Despite several attempts in the House of Representatives during the Trump years to enact legislation that would modestly increase the weight given to performance over time-of-service, the fierce opposition by federal managers associations and unions representing long-serving but not necessarily well-performing constituents explains why the bills failed to advance. A determined President should insist that performance be first and be wary of costly types of reductions-in-force. Impenetrable Bureaucracy. The GAO has identified almost a hundred actions that the executive branch or Congress could take to improve efficiency and effec- tiveness across 37 areas that span a broad range of government missions and functions. It identified 33 actions to address mission fragmentation, overlap, and duplication in the 12 areas of defense, economic development, health, homeland security, and information technology. It also identified 59 other opportunities for executive agencies or Congress to reduce the cost of government operations or enhance revenue collection across 25 areas of government.20 A logical place to begin would be to identify and eliminate functions and pro- grams that are duplicated across Cabinet departments or spread across multiple agencies. Congress hoped to help this effort by passing the Government Perfor- mance and Results Act of 1993,21 which required all federal agencies to define their missions, establish goals and objectives, and measure and report their per- formance to Congress. Three decades of endless time-consuming reports later, the government continues to grow but with more paper and little change either in performance or in the number of levels between government and the people. The Brookings Institution’s Paul Light emphasizes the importance of the increasing number of levels between the top heads of departments and the people at the bottom who receive the products of government decision-making. He esti- mates that there are perhaps 50 or more levels of impenetrable bureaucracy and no way other than imperfect performance appraisals to communicate between them.22 The Trump Administration proposed some possible consolidations, but these were not received favorably in Congress, whose approval is necessary for most such proposals. The best solution is to cut functions and budgets and devolve respon- sibilities. That is a challenge primarily for Presidents, Congress, and the entire government, but the OPM still needs to lead the way governmentwide in managing personnel properly even in any future smaller government. Creating a Responsible Career Management Service. The people elect a President who is charged by Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution23 with seeing that the laws are “faithfully executed” with his political appointees democratically linked to that legitimizing responsibility. An autonomous bureaucracy has neither — 80 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Therefore, career civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms. The creation of the Senior Executive Service was the top career change intro- duced by the 1978 Carter–Campbell Civil Service Reform Act. Its aim was to professionalize the career service and make it more responsible to the democrat- ically elected commander in chief and his political appointees while respecting the rights due to career employees, very much including those in the top positions. The new SES would allow management to be more flexible in filling and reassigning executive positions and locations beyond narrow specialties for more efficient mission accomplishment and would provide pay and large bonuses to motivate career performance. The desire to infiltrate political appointees improperly into the high career civil service has been widespread in every Administration, whether Democrat or Republican. Democratic Administrations, however, are typically more successful because they require the cooperation of careerists, who generally lean heavily to the Left. Such burrowing-in requires career job descriptions for new positions that closely mirror the functions of a political appointee; a special hiring authority that allows the bypassing of veterans’ preference as well as other preference categories; and the ability to frustrate career candidates from taking the desired position. President Reagan’s OPM began by limiting such SES burrowing-in, arguing that the proper course was to create and fill political positions. This simultane- ously promotes the CSRA principle of political leadership of the bureaucracy and respects the professional autonomy of the career service. But this requires that career SES employees should respect political rights too. Actions such as career staff reserving excessive numbers of key policy positions as “career reserved” to deny them to noncareer SES employees frustrate CSRA intent. Another evasion is the general domination by career staff on SES personnel evaluation boards, the opposite of noncareer executives dominating these critical meeting discussions as expected in the SES. Career training also often underplays the political role in leadership and inculcates career-first policy and value viewpoints. Frustrated with these activities by top career executives, the Trump Adminis- tration issued Executive Order 1395724 to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the com- petitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F. It ordered the Director of OPM and agency heads to set procedures to prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions and prepare procedures to create exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, from which they can relocate back to the regular civil service after such service. The order was subsequently reversed by President

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Policy matches are calculated using a hybrid approach: initial candidates are found using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text, then an AI model (Llama 3.1 70B) provides detailed alignment ratings and analysis. Ratings range from 1 (minimal alignment) to 5 (very strong alignment). This analysis does not imply direct causation or intent.

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