The U.S. Senate stayed in session all night as Democrats delayed a vote on confirming Russell Vought to serve as Office of Management and Budget Director, a position he previously held during part of President Donald Trump’s first term in office.

In a 53-47 party-line vote on Wednesday, all 53 Republicans invoked cloture on the nomination, while all 45 Democrats, and the two independent senators who caucus with the Democrats, voted against the move.

While Democrats cannot stop the vote from eventually taking place, they are using all of the 30 hours available before the inevitable vote on Trump’s nominee.

‘I just came off the floor after speaking for an hour,’ Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., noted in a tweet on Wednesday. ‘I refuse to let Republicans confirm Russ Vought the easy way, so we’re holding the floor through the night for 30 straight hours. Vought has shown he’ll ignore the law & constitution. I’ll be voting NO tomorrow.’

GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma has been pointing out that Senate Republicans will vote to confirm Vought on Thursday evening.

‘Once again, OMB nominee Russell Vought will be confirmed at 7pm ET tomorrow. @SenateGOP has the votes. Enjoy your speeches,’ he tweeted on Wednesday in response to a post in which Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., spoke about the Democrats’ plan.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Vought a ‘horrible, dangerous man,’ during remarks at a rally on Tuesday.

Trump announced Vought as his pick for OMB last year.

‘He did an excellent job serving in this role in my First Term – We cut four Regulations for every new Regulation, and it was a Great Success!’ he noted in a post on Truth social at the time. 

‘Russ has spent many years working in Public Policy in Washington, D.C., and is an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies. Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People,’ Trump declared.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was tapped as the acting director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) just days ago, is taking on another new role in President Donald Trump’s new administration. 

Rubio is now also serving as the acting director of the U.S. Archives, ABC News reported, citing a high-level official. Fox News Digital reached out to the State Department for comment, but they did not immediately respond.

Trump signaled last month his intention of replacing the now-former national archivist Colleen Shogan, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, during a brief phone interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. The National Archives notified the Justice Department in early 2022 over classified documents Trump allegedly took with him to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving office. That would later result in an FBI raid, and Trump being indicted by former special counsel Jack Smith. 

The source told ABC News that Rubio has been the acting archivist since shortly after Trump was sworn in as the 47th president last month. 

This week, Rubio is traveling on his first official State Department trip to Central America, during which he convinced the Panamanian president to end its Belt and Roads project deal with the Chinese government. Trump has said the United States could claim the Panama Canal through economic or military measures if necessary after raising concerns about Beijing allegedly controlling the strategic waterway that was constructed by the U.S. 

The Trump administration has suspended some foreign aid pending a review into how U.S. taxpayer dollars are being spent abroad, resulting in thousands of layoffs and ended programs. 

While addressing reporters in Guatemala City on Wednesday, Rubio said he issued waivers for certain programs that assist in gathering biometric information to better identify fugitives, as well as bolster technology and K-9 units to identify shipments of deadly fentanyl and precursor chemicals, showing ‘firsthand the kind of foreign aid America wants to be involved in.’ 

‘This is an example of foreign aid that’s in our national interest. That’s why I’ve issued a waiver for these programs, that’s why these programs are coming back online, and they will be functioning, because it’s a way of showing to the American people this is the kind of foreign aid that’s aligned with our foreign policy, with our national interest,’ Rubio said.

America’s top diplomat said the United States wants some fugitives who are ‘strategic objectives, meaning they help us strengthen our partners, and they help us to cut the head off the snake of a transnational group that’s particularly dangerous.’ He said the State Department would be ‘working very closely’ with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department in ‘prioritizing our extradition requests so that they align with our strategic objective with regards to who it is that we’re going after.’

The State Department announced on Wednesday that ‘the government of Panama has agreed to no longer charge fees for U.S. government vessels to transit the Panama Canal,’ saving the U.S. government ‘millions of dollars a year.’ 

However, the Panama Canal Authority denied having made any adjustments to the tolls or transit agreements of the canal despite the State Department’s announcement, adding that they are ‘ready to establish a dialogue with the relevant officials of the United States regarding the transit of warships.’ Earlier this week, Rubio voiced frustration about U.S. Navy ships having to pay to transit through the canal despite the U.S. being under treaty agreement to defend the canal if it is attacked. 

‘Secretary of State Marco Rubio is such a breath of fresh air & he’s proven to be incredibly effective in implementing President Trump’s PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH vision for the world,’ Rep. Carlos Giménez, a Republican ally of Rubio in Congress representing south Florida, said in a statement to Fox News Digital. ‘Panama has agreed to drop its ‘memorandum of understanding’ with Communist China & to waive the toll for U.S. Navy ships transiting the Canal Zone. Panama must continue to work with the United States to evict Communist China from their country & achieve a productive, long-term deal that prioritizes both of our countries’ shared interests.’

Besides the canal, Rubio has focused his trip on immigration, praising the Panamanians for the decreased flow of migrants through the Darien Gap and overseeing a deportation flight of Colombian nationals back to Colombia. 

Rubio secured two agreements with first, El Salvador, and then Guatemala on Wednesday, for the countries to accept deportees from the U.S.

Now that the dust has settled on President Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power, it is time to govern. The president has already signed hundreds of executive orders tackling issues from immigration to DEI. He is working non-stop for the American people, and he is just getting started. This truly is a new golden age for America, a period of technological advancement, prosperity, and peace.

On Nov. 5, 2024, Trump achieved the greatest comeback in political history against all odds. He did so because he and his family had a strong team of America First patriots behind them. In the years since he left office in 2020, many of these patriots faced unemployment, Big Tech censorship, lawfare, and debanking simply because they supported Trump and refused to disown him. Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon even went to jail for him. Many woke actors in corporate America played a role in canceling these patriots, and Trump knows this. He remembers how in 2020, corporate America flocked to donate millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter, knowing that it was a Marxist organization, but refused to donate to his campaign.

Today, woke corporate America is busy rebranding itself as MAGA-friendly so it can cozy up to the new Trump administration. These moves are at best cosmetic. My advice to the president, the Trump White House and broader administration following these moves? Don’t believe your lying eyes. Big Tech is not your friend. Do not put hope over experience and sell yourself short. Mark Zuckerberg may have given the Trump inaugural fund $1 million, but he spent $400 million trying to stop Trump in 2020.

So why is Big Tech cozying up to MAGA like they are on a cheap date? The answer is easy: antitrust law enforcement. What Big Tech really cares about is not Trump, or his family, or even the country. What they really fear is tough, but fair, antitrust enforcement by the Trump administration.

Today, Alphabet (Google and YouTube), Amazon, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), and Apple are facing major, bipartisan antitrust lawsuits from the Justice Department and FTC. Several of these cases began under the Trump 45 administration, including two cases against Google filed by the Justice Department. The Biden Justice Department won the first case, and the Trump Justice Department is poised to win the second case. Google is banking on the Trump 47 Justice Department pulling its punches on both cases. They and the other Big Tech platforms desperately want a return to the Bush-Obama Uniparty antitrust ‘enforcement,’ and they are hoping they can fool the Trump 47 administration into going there. 

After all, the George W. Bush and Obama administrations enforced the antitrust laws so little that they put the ‘Big’ in Big Tech. It was the Obama administration that waved through Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, and it was the Obama White House that forced the Federal Trade Commission to close an early monopolization investigation into Google back in 2013. The Big Tech platforms used this uniparty antitrust amnesty to hyperscale and become dominant in several important online markets.

President Trump is smart enough to know a bad deal when he sees one; he literally wrote a book called ‘The Art of the Deal.’ He is also too smart to buy the argument that Big Tech monopolists must become even bigger and more dominant in order to compete with China. America will win the AI global race the American way, like it always has.

Free markets exist only when antitrust laws are enforced with vigor. Free markets require functioning markets. And when the trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists – Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple – crush competition, shutter small businesses, cancel those with whom they disagree, and carry China’s water, we no longer have functioning and free-markets. We must end Big Tech’s gatekeeping power over information and commerce.

There is clear historical precedent for this: If President Reagan had listened to AT&T in 1984, we might never have seen the competition and innovation unleashed by the Ma Bell breakup. This innovation included the wireless industry and key parts of the early internet. At the time, the tech giant argued that it needed to be a monopoly so the U.S. could compete globally with the Soviet Union. Of course, AT&T was wrong, and the Soviet Union crumbled in 1990. But if Reagan had listened to the company in 1984, not only would he have been on the wrong side of history, Americans might never have benefited from the competition and innovation brought about by antitrust law enforcement against AT&T.

President Trump’s antitrust law enforcers, led by Gail Slater at the Trump Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, will be fair and enforce the law impartially, protecting the U.S. free market from woke monopolists and standing up for American values and American consumers. They will target the anticompetitive tumors on the free market, which is the opposite of the industry-wide regulations (market-entry barriers to startup competitors) the Big Tech monopolists (like Facebook) seek.

Uniparty antitrust that favors woke corporations and Big Tech monopolists will do the opposite. Big Tech and their allies alongside the DC establishment will pull every dirty trick in the book to undermine Trump’s antitrust law enforcers, but Trump knows better. This is his time for choosing Trump antitrust over uniparty Bush-Obama antitrust. To quote Reagan, when it comes to antitrust, Trump should ‘dance with the one who brung ya.’

Mike Davis is the Founder and President of the Article III Project.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-TX, is reintroducing a constitutional amendment to cap the number of Supreme Court Justices at nine, amid calls to expand the court. 

Cruz, now joined by 15 cosponsors including Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy (LA), Chuck Grassley (IA), Mike Crapo (ID), Thom Tillis (NC) and John Cornyn (TX), previously introduced the amendment in 2021 and in 2023. 

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Cruz said Democrats are seeking to ‘use the Court to advance policy goals they can’t accomplish electorally.’

‘Such a move would be a direct assault on the design of our Constitution, which is designed to ensure the Supreme Court remains a non-partisan guardian of the rule of law,’ Cruz said. ‘This amendment is a badly-needed check on their efforts to undermine the integrity of the Court.’ 

Likewise, Grassley said the amendment would ensure the Court’s independence from political pressures. 

‘Democrats’ radical court packing scheme would erase the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and destroy historic precedent,’ Grassley said in a statement. ‘The Court is a co-equal branch of government, and our Keep Nine Amendment will ensure that it remains independent from political pressure.’

The nine-justice court currently has a conservative supermajority. Following various landmark decisions in recent years, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Democrats have re-upped calls to impose court reforms, including expanding and packing the court as well as imposing term limits. 

In October, then-Vice President Kamala Harris entertained the notion of imposing court reforms during a CNN town hall. Harris was asked if she would support expanding the number of justices from the current nine to 12. 

‘There is no question that the American people increasingly are losing confidence in the Supreme Court and, in large part, because of the behavior of certain members of that court and because of certain rulings, including the Dobbs decision and taking away a precedent that had been in place for 50 years, protecting a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body,’ Harris said during the event.

‘So, I do believe that there should be some kind of reform of the court, and we can study what that actually looks like.’ 

Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, also called for reforming the Court that same month, saying in social media posts, ‘We need to radically reform the broken Supreme Court.’

Democrats have consistently proposed legislation to expand the Supreme Court to a 13-justice bench. 

In May 2023, Georgia Democrat Rep. Hank Johnson joined Democratic Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Tina Smith of Minnesota, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as well as Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler of New York, Cori Bush of Mississippi, and Adam Schiff of California, in reintroducing the Judiciary Act of 2023.  

‘We want to prevent this kind of rot and decay from ever overtaking a Supreme Court again,’ Johnson told Fox News Digital in October. 

The U.S. State Department on Wednesday announced a new deal with the government of Panama that will eliminate charge fees for U.S. government vessels.

‘The government of Panama has agreed to no longer charge fees for U.S. government vessels to transit the Panama Canal,’ the State Department wrote in an X post Wednesday night.

The new agreement will save the U.S. government millions of dollars a year, officials noted.

Panama President José Raúl Mulino promised on Sunday to end a key development deal with China after meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 

During his visit, former Florida Senator Rubio wrote in a post on X that ‘the United States cannot, and will not, allow the Chinese Communist Party to continue with its effective and growing control over the Panama Canal area.’ 

President Donald Trump, who has openly criticized the six-figure premiums imposed on U.S. ships traveling through, has suggested repurchasing the canal.

It was built over decades by the U.S., but was later handed over to Panama during the Carter administration.

A newly introduced bill called the ‘Panama Canal Repurchase Act’ would give Trump and Rubio the authority to negotiate with Panama to repurchase the canal.

More than 70 percent of all vessels traveling through the canal are inbound or outbound to U.S. ports, according to the State Department. It is also a key transit point for U.S. Coast Guard and Department of Defense vessels. 

Ships would need to travel 8,000 additional miles around South America to avoid using the pathway.

Fox News Digital requested comment from the State Department, but did not immediately receive a response as of Wednesday night.

Fox News Digital’s Danielle Wallace and Stepheny Price contributed to this report.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.