WASHINGTON >> The Senate, once again, was working into the early morning hours Friday with its new majority leader, Republican John Thune, setting the pace.

It wasn’t until just after 2 a.m. that the last of the senators had straggled into the chamber to cast their vote on the confirmation of retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The vote capped a grinding start to the year for the Senate that included several all-night floor sessions and — importantly for Thune — the quickest top-level Cabinet confirmation process in the past 20 years.

At the outset, however, such an outcome was far from assured. President Donald Trump was making demands that the new Senate leader be ready to put the chamber into recess so he could skip over the Senate confirmation process altogether. Faced with that prospect, Thune, R-South Dakota, said his message in conversations with the president was, “Let us do this the old-fashioned way and just use the clock and grind it out, and then we’ll see where we go from there.”

That approach has been successful at allowing Thune to show Trump the Senate’s worth while also preserving its constitutional role in installing a president’s Cabinet. But the decision to push forward on even Trump’s most unconventional Cabinet nominees has also come at a cost.

Several Cabinet officials have been intimately involved in the early controversies of Trump’s second term, from discussing military plans on an unclassified Signal app chat to encouraging the Republican president to follow through with steep tariffs on trading partners.

GOP senators, many of whom still hold traditional Republican ideas, have often had to mount a response. The Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, last month initiated an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general into whether classified information was shared on Signal by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. And GOP senators more recently made a concerted effort to encourage Trump to negotiate trade deals with other nations rather than listen to advisers such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was adamant that tariffs were there to stay.