Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, urged Democratic senators on Tuesday to join him in voting against all of President Trump’s nominees in a show of protest against Mr. Trump’s unilateral moves to dismantle and defund major portions of the federal government.
The plea for blanket opposition was only symbolic. Relegated to the minority in the Senate, Democrats have no power to block Mr. Trump’s nominees unless they can persuade a handful of Republicans to join them, and the Republican Party has largely fallen into line behind the president’s picks.
But the entreaty was a notable change in strategy for Mr. Schumer, who has come under increasing pressure from progressive activists, Democratic governors and some senators to take a more aggressive and confrontational stance against Mr. Trump in response to the president’s efforts to steer around Congress on spending and policy.
Mr. Schumer told Democratic governors on a call last week that he could not force every senator in his party to oppose every Trump nominee, and that he would focus instead on certain high-profile candidates like Russell T. Vought, the president’s pick to serve as budget director and the architect of the ultraconservative Project 2025 policy agenda.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Schumer made the new position known twice: first, on a leadership call in the morning, and then in the closed-door Senate Democratic Caucus lunch. Previously, Mr. Schumer had voted to support Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
The majority of Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees have made it through committee votes with some level of bipartisan support. Mr. Duffy received all 13 Democratic votes coming out of committee, and Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, received all 11 Democratic votes coming out of the agriculture panel. Democrats also unanimously supported a procedural move last week to advance Mr. Duffy’s nomination to a final vote.
But progressive activists have urged Democrats to get tougher after some of Mr. Trump’s early executive actions, including his directive to temporarily freeze trillions of dollars of federal spending; his decision to put almost the entire global work force of the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave; and his move to give Elon Musk’s team access to the Treasury Department’s federal payment system.
“I have decided that I’m not going to vote for a single nominee so long as he’s engaged in an effort to obliterate the Constitution,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview.
Mr. Murphy had previously voted for Mr. Duffy and Mr. Rubio, but he said he changed his mind about voting on a case-by-case basis after the federal funding freeze.
“It would not help us to be working with Republicans at the very moment the Constitution is being lit on fire,” he said. “This moment demands some extraordinary tactics.”
On Wednesday, the day after Mr. Schumer urged the caucus to unite in opposition to the Trump appointees, just two Democrats broke ranks and voted to confirm Eric Turner as housing secretary: Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Peter Welch of Vermont.
Democrats planned to hold an all-night talk-a-thon on Wednesday to protest Mr. Vought’s confirmation, but had no hope of stopping it.
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