RE-NOMINATIONS…. Conservative obstructionism has blocked votes on a wide variety of key presidential nominees in the Senate over the last year. All of the qualified nominees would be approved if given a vote, so the right has done everything possible to abuse procedural rules to prevent up-or-down consideration.
The White House is getting sick of it. Good.
President Obama is increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of confirmation for his judicial and executive appointees, according to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
Gibbs expressed the administration’s discontent with what he deemed a deliberate commitment to obstructionism by Republicans in the Senate. But he added that he was not aware of any effort by the president’s legislative staff to draft legislative language to dampen the use or effectiveness of the filibuster.
“We have put a number of people into government in the first year,” Gibbs said, in a response to a question by the Huffington Post. “But at the same time we have seen a pacing in dealing with nominations, both for the executive branch and judicial nominations that, I think, by almost any estimation would be deemed slow.”
Sam Stein reported that seven judicial and political appointees will be re-nominated by the president, including Dawn Johnsen, who was nominated in March to head the Office of Legal Counsel, but who can’t get a floor vote, in part because conservatives disapprove of her opposition to Bush-era torture memos.
The re-nominations can’t formally happen until the Senate returns on Jan. 20
Of course, if the president really wanted to shake things up, he could use recess appointments and highlight their necessity in the face of a dysfunctional Senate process….
