The Last Time the Senate Rejected a President’s Cabinet Nominee of the Same Party

While President-elect Donald Trump has begun to announce his Cabinet appointees, many of his picks still need to be confirmed by the Senate. But Trump’s controversial and unconventional choices will test the Republican-led Senate’s loyalty, and could potentially lead to a situation that hasn’t happened in 100 years.

In U.S. history, only twelve Cabinet nominations have been rejected—and rarely has a President’s Cabinet pick been denied by his own party. The last time it occurred was in 1925, when the Republican-controlled Senate rejected President Calvin Coolidge’s attempts to nominate Charles B. Warren as Attorney General. 

TIME put Warren on its cover in January 1925 after Coolidge announced the nomination. “It is said that the President wanted Mr. Warren as someone to whom he was close, someone he could rely on,” TIME wrote. “Intellectually he is probably the ablest man whom Mr. Coolidge has added to the Cabinet,” the story continued, describing Warren as “suave of face, almost good looking.”

TIME further described Warren as "a capable strategist, hard to trick, always ready for sortie or counter-attack, complete and instant master of the forces of his mind."

But issues soon arose with the nomination. Warren had been involved in a “Sugar Trust” scandal involving the Michigan Sugar Company, where he had recently resigned from his position as president. The Michigan Sugar Company was one of seventeen companies charged by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for “engaging in a wrongful combination and conspiracy to suppress competition in the distribution and sale of beet pulp in interstate commerce,” according to a statement published in New York Times on Feb. 10, 1925.

Warren was named as a defendant in the suit. “The evidence presented demonstrated clearly that Mr. Warren was the agent and instrument of the sugar trust in acquiring control of the Michigan beet sugar industry and suppressing competition from that source,” according to the Times statement, which also claimed that any alleged conspiracy committed by the companies were “sanctioned” by Warren. 

Senators feared that his connection would leave him unable to impartially enforce anti-trust laws. One Congressman, Missouri Senator James Reed, argued, “I trust that a sufficient number of Senators who have not been seduced to political apostasy by the family sap bucket, or gorged into stupefaction by buckwheat cakes and Vermont maple syrup, or lulled to moral insensibility by the melody of waves breaking against the prow of the Mayflower— I trust there are enough left to vote against delivering the Department of Justice into the hands of the Sugar Trust.”

The first confirmation vote resulted in a 40-40 tie, which could have been broken by Vice President  Charles Dawes—if he hadn’t at the time been taking a nap at the nearby Willard Hotel. 

A group of Republicans warned Coolidge against resubmitting the nomination, but the President still nominated him a second time. The White House released a statement saying, “The President is making every effort to secure the confirmation of Mr. Warren. . . . He has decided on no other appointment. [In case Mr. Warren is not confirmed] he will offer him a recess appointment. He hopes, however, that the unbroken practice of three generations of permitting the President to choose his own cabinet will not be changed. …”

The Senate again rejected Warren, 46-39. 

Since then, only two nominations have been rejected— Lewis Strauss for Secretary of Commerce in 1959 and John Tower for Secretary of Defense in 1989, both of whom were Republican nominees rejected by a Democrat-controlled Senate.