# Advice and Consent **Status: stub — expand.** The Senate's constitutional role in two distinct acts of the President: making treaties and appointing officers, both under **Article II, § 2, cl. 2**. Treaties require the concurrence of **two-thirds** of senators present; appointments require a **simple majority**. The House has no part in either. The phrase describes a *shared* power, not a courtesy. The President nominates alone; the appointment does not exist until the Senate consents and the commission is signed. Everything contested about the modern confirmation process — cloture thresholds, blue slips, holds, batching, acting officials, recess appointments — is an argument about how much friction the consent half is entitled to impose, conducted almost entirely through Senate procedure rather than constitutional text. Two structural asymmetries define its current shape. The **advice** half has largely disappeared: pre-nomination consultation survives only where a procedural gate forces it, which for judges means the [[Blue Slip]] on district seats. And the **consent** half has been progressively cheapened by majority-set precedent — the 2013 and 2017 [[Nuclear Option]] votes made every nomination a simple-majority matter, and the September 2025 en bloc precedent let executive-branch nominees be confirmed in packages, with Article III judges expressly carved out. ## See also - [[Confirmation Pipeline]] · [[How a Nominee Becomes a Federal Judge]] · [[How a Treaty Is Made and Ratified]] - [[Appointments Clause]] · [[Cloture]] · [[Nuclear Option]] · [[Blue Slip]] · [[Recess Appointment]] - [[United States Senate]] · [[Senate Judiciary Committee]]