The Washington Post has a handy head count of Obama cabinet appointments. Here are a few examples of unconfirmed appointees:
- Lael Brainard, nominated to be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs on March 23, 2009.
- Mary Smith, Assistant Attorney General for Tax, nominated April 8, 2009
- David Schroeder, Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy, nominated June 4, 2009
- Arthur Elkins, Jr, Inspector General at the EPA, nominated November 18, 2009.
Five of the seven unconfirmed nominees at Justice were nominated in 2009, and Justice has the most unconfirmed appointees of any cabinet agency.
Update: Violet asked for a timeline comparing the Obama backlog to the Bush administration. This is the best I could find, dated January 20, 2010:
The Senate backlog continues to grow, now reaching over 200 pending nominations, not counting the large number of nominations to ambassadorships and federal attorney positions, which WHTP does not track. The 208 in the Senate backlog is about 70 more than the Senate had backlogged at the end of 2001, amounting to a 53% increase over the Bush backlog.
gogol's wife
OT except it’s mistermix — I’ve been off the internet for a while, but did anyone notice that Charles Cook himself showed up at the end of that thread from yesterday to defend himself? This is getting to be a trend.
Bob K
Well, maybe the G(NO)P just wants to keep all those Bush/Cheney moles in place to throw monkey wrenches into the Obama Administration from within. Besides, after the 2012 elections Romney/Paul/Palin/Gingrich will want to hit the ground running on 1/20/13 won’t they?
BDeevDad
I’d venture DOJ is even worse off considering:
Brian J
I’m iffy on the notion of just doing what you want outside the normal parameters of appointments, because it just sets up the other team to appoint a bunch of Monica Goodlings (third highest rank in the Justice Department, with a JD from Regent University, and in her thirties at the time; enough said). But it’s clear Obama isn’t trying to appoint unqualified hacks. If anything, he’s appointing people who share our valies but who are being held back because of their distinct non-hackishness (i.e. Dawn Johnsen).
Whenever the next recess time is, he just needs to clean House wherever possible and make any and all appointments necessary. I suspect this is particularly necessary at important offices like the Justice Department, where well respected Republicans were shown the door in favor of hacks, cranks, and charlatans. He could tap dance across the Hudson while curing cancer, and the Republicans would still find a way to complain, with the press legitimizing their remarks, so he can’t worry about their response.
mistermix
@gogol’s wife: No, I didn’t. Thanks for pointing that out.
Violet
@gogol’s wife:
Wow, you’re right. Here’s the thread link: https://balloon-juice.com/2010/04/17/serious-trouble-in-the-house/. Scroll to the bottom to find his comment. Interesting.
Is there some kind of visual timeline of nominations and confirmations for Obama and then those of the last several presidents? It would nice to see how this Congress stacks up to the previous ones in terms of stalling everything.
Bob K
OT – Maybe Lord Murdoch’s legal department had a few words with him. Blame it on Dicks Armey.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/15/fox-news-pulls-sean-hanni_n_539719.html
Doubt charges will ever come out of this, but I can dream can’t I?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/is-sean-hannitys-charity-a-scam/snakeoil/
sam
It’s Chris Schroeder for OLP.
Xenos
@gogol’s wife: Where is the Cook comment? Maybe I am cognitively disabled, but I can’t find it on the thread or any others.
So many threads, even on the weekend, and I can’t keep up!
Svensker
@Xenos:
See Violet’s comment 6 above.
Napoleon
A functioning justice department is not in the interest of the monied interest that fund the conservatives.
@gogol’s wife:
Really? How do we know it is really him?
Brian J
@Napoleon:
Even if it’s not him, it looks like Cook wasn’t caught blindsided by the House flipping.
But anyway, who would want to impersonate Charlie Cook on one of these threads?
Napoleon
@Brian J:
You have a point.
Besides after reading the threads it has to be Cook. I think he offered a pretty good defense of himself.
Brian J
@Napoleon:
I still hope he’s wronger than wrong this time, or at least wrong enough that the loses are limited to the Democrats just keeping control of the House. I can deal with a razor thin majority, even if it does make things even slower than they are now.
But a Republican majority, even one based on just a few seats? Kill me now. It’s not that I think Obama is set to lose in 2012. In fact, I think he’s going to win so thoroughly that we will probably make up whatever loses we suffer in 2010, or at least half of them. Yet if we see a Republican House, it’ll change the dynamic, at least on the surface, and we will be treated to endless stories of the new Republican mood of the country, when in fact it’s anything but. Hell, even if we lose 20 seats, which would be pretty good, we’ll still probably hear that crap, even if it isn’t anything more than the Democrats running up against a natural wall–in other words, even if it’s nothing but them not being able to flip any more slightly red and purple seats.
I can’t get worked up about the Senate, partly because I’d rather trade a seat in Pennsylvania for the time being for a seat in Arizona for what could be the start of a trend, but also because we could, in some small sense, gain seats. And if we end up losing the Senate, the House losses will be massive, and I will probably drink myself into a stupor.
demo woman
@Brian J: You can click to cook’s site from his name. I’m not sure how the democratic party avoids a blood bath. The Tea Party although small dominates the news media.
I’m stock piling the liquor.
Napoleon
@Brian J:
I am willing to enter into a mutual suicide pack with you if that happens. It will totally drive me to despair.
For years I have felt that the tide had finally turned and that demographic and voting trend changes would give Dems a comfortable margin in both houses for some time, and that only 9/11 had put that day off. If it all comes crashing down only 4 years in, even if they get the majority back in 2 years time, the Republicans will stick to their scorched Earth policies for the rest of my years alive.
Alex S.
Hmm, soon the waiting time will be longer than the actual tenure,
Napoleon
PS, I actually think the Dems are going to do better then expected. I suspect the Dems will get more reved up as the election approaches and that this is the year that traditional polling breaks down because of the increased use of cell phones.
Bob K
@Napoleon
this is the year that traditional polling breaks down because of the increased use of cell phones.
If it works for “American Idol” and “Dancing with the Stars”
why shouldn’t it work for the midterms?
demo woman
@Napoleon: Hopefully you’re correct in your analysis but dems and reved up should not be in the same sentence.
Brian J
@Napoleon:
It’s not that I think any gains will be permanent, barring some sort of event that forces trends to go in a completely different direction, assuming that’s possible. It’s just that the narrative will be personally awful, because I’ll have to listen to a bunch of morons around me crow about how this is somehow historically significant, as opposed to the back-to-back gains in 2006 and 2008, something that has happened only a few times in the last 100 years. But bigger than my personal suffering will be the possible damage done to the country, possibly helped along by our own president. Indeed, I worry that if the media heralds this as the the New Era of Republican Dominance and Awesomeness and Stuff, President Obama will continue to fight on their terms. I admire him greatly, but he needs to start being a little more of an asshole. The calls to Dick Cheney in the hospital are all well and good, but that doesn’t mean he can’t also have Robert Gibbs and everyone else in his administration tell the Republicans to fuck off when they claim the Democrats are responsible for poor financial reform.
Like you, I suspect that the Democrats won’t do that badly…if they start pounding the pavement now. What’s to prevent House and Senate candidates from knocking on each and every door in their district or visiting every county in their states, even if they are down 30 points? What’s to prevent Obama, even with his busy schedule, from doing a personal appearance or two for every single Senate candidate, from Florida to Arizona to Kentucky in order to raise awareness? They will almost certainly lose seats in the House and could lose a few in the Senate, too, but it’s April, and I while I said this back in February, too, it’s still very, very far away from election day. Start now, run smart and hard, and the results will probably be a lot better for us than we can imagine. Doing nothing, or doing a lot less than we could be doing, only guarantees that we will stumble.
PaulW
This is simply more proof that the Cabinet nomination process should only be the top jobs, the Secretary of ____ jobs and the Supreme Court Justice jobs, and everything else put into Civil Service so that the Senate can’t undermine the Executive and Judicial branches like this.
Violet
Thanks for this! Very interesting stuff. I’ll wade through it later today. Sounds like the delays on Obama’s nominations are much higher than during Bush’s.
Charlie Cook
I just posted a response to Mike Kay from yesterday’s thread at the end of that one. Here it is as well:
Waves develop when they develop. You can’t see a wave develop before it exists. The Republican wave in 1994 didn’t develop until that summer. There were some early warning signs in late Spring, but it wasn’t clear there was a wave until after the crime bill before the August recess.
The Democratic wave of 2006 didn’t develop until that summer. This wave began developing last summer, you could see the data moving over the summer and fall, the bottom fall out in the Virginia gubernatorial race (New Jersey might have happened anyway), the Massachusetts Senate race, on and on. But the deterioration, whether you want to look at the President and Dems dropping sharply among independents last summer. My larger point is that the same diagnostic indicators that suggested Republicans were in trouble in 2006 began manifesting themselves last summer. Though I started my newsletter in 1984, the first true wave election that came along was 1994, we saw a wave, I gave it the tsunami label, but we underestimated the size of the wave by sticking to the race-by-race, micro-political approach. Once a wave hits a certain level, that kind of analysis doesn’t work. We changed how we approached wave elections in 2006 and our projections were right on the money. We are applying the same standards and approach this year.
LosGatosCA
It’s too pathetic that the Democrats don’t pick up on the Republicans games.
Of course, the better to slow done judicial appointments and simultaneously let the burrowed in Regent grads to sabotage things. These Fifth Colimnists have been doing the same thing since Clinton stole his first election.