Subject: Re: Trump Tells Senate Repubs
Going forward, what percentage of appointments will go through the normal Congressional Approval process?
And what percentage of appointments will simply be made by Trump during Congressional recesses?

I don't think that's a very useful metric, though. The GOP has 53 seats in the Senate and the tie-breaker. Few nominees will have trouble getting through the regular appointment process - and nearly all the nominees that Trump will appoint (in sheer numbers) will be appointed in the first few months of his Administration as he staffs the government.

The recess appointment used to be regularly, but not frequently, used back in the day. It's a fairly recent phenomenon that the the Senate started doing pro forma sessions during the times it would normally be in recess, in order to completely block recess appointments. The Obama Administration was quite upset by what they saw as a Congressional usurpation of Executive Power (recess appointments are specifically enumerated in the Constitution), and they took it all the way to the Supreme Court, but SCOTUS held that Congress had the power to do that. And that ordinary political give-and-take between the Executive and Legislative branches was available to the President if he wanted them to stop doing the pro forma sessions.

We'll soon see whether Trump is genuinely trying to avoid A&C altogether for any tough nomination - or whether he's just pushing back against the "pretextual" use of pro forma sessions for no purpose other than to block the "normal" recess appointments that used to take place regularly. But I don't think percentage of appointments will tell us that. Rather, we'll see whether Congress deliberately recesses at a novel time, just to create a recess for Trump to take advantage of.