Confirming Nominees Shouldn’t Be This Hard



Confirming Nominees Shouldn’t Be This Hard

by Jonathan Bernstein, bloomberg.com

August 12, 2021 06:37 AM

It’s a mess.

Photo by: Photographer: Demetrius Freeman/Pool/Getty

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The executive branch confirmation process is a mess, again.

The good news is that President Joe Biden has been doing a first-rate job of sending up nominees. He still hasn’t nominated anyone for a few major vacancies — notably, an open seat remains on the Federal Reserve Board; there’s still no replacement for the failed nomination of Neera Tanden for director of the Office of Management and Budget; and it was only this week that the president finally settled on a nominee for solicitor general. Still, Biden has offered plenty of qualified picks, and hardly any of them have run into trouble. It’s enough that the first academic study of the Biden transition, including nominations, gave him high marks. 

The bad news? Well, Politico’s Nahal Toosi and Alexander Ward put it this way: “Overall, Biden has nominated 405 people for Senate-confirmable positions across the government, including the State Department. Of those, 288 are still awaiting confirmation, far more than his modern predecessors. Before Biden, and dating back to Bill Clinton, no president had more than 178 nominees awaiting confirmation at this stage. (That was Donald Trump.)”

That’s before the last handful of confirmations were processed leading up to the Senate’s August recess, but unlike in previous administrations there was no large list of nominees agreed to before the break. The result? While Barack Obama had 293 of his important nominations confirmed at this point, and George W. Bush had 283, Biden has only 127.

One reason for the disparity is Senator Ted Cruz’s efforts to shut down State Department nominations over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Another is that Republicans have generally been dragging their feet, just as Democrats did during Trump’s presidency and Republicans did during Obama’s. Before Democrats eliminated the ability of minority parties to filibuster nominations in 2013, Republicans had blocked specific nominees and specific positions. Since then, the Senate minority hasn’t been able to defeat any nomination. What they can do is slow up the entire process, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. That’s a big reason why Biden’s number of nominees confirmed at this point is similar to Trump’s (116), even though Biden has been far more aggressive in sending names to the Senate and has had far fewer picks caught in controversy. 

The result of all this is that reformers have been pushing for fewer Senate-confirmed nominations. That’s probably where we’re headed; even without the partisan wars slowing things down, the Senate is overwhelmed by the task. 

But it’s worth pointing out that there’s another option: The Senate could increase its capacity to cope with the job. More professional staff would help. And while Senate majorities can’t magically create more floor time for considering nominations, perhaps some new procedures could be created to solve the time crunch. The goal would be to still allow senators to press for their policy interests — as Cruz is doing now — but to also make it possible to confirm nominees at a much faster pace, especially uncontroversial picks and those for lower-tier positions. 

It’s true that the Senate’s failure to deal with nominations weakens Congress and strengthens the presidency (and, perhaps, the bureaucracy). But the same would be true if lawmakers gave up and reduced the number of confirmable positions. The Senate should try to fix this problem in a way that increases its influence, not surrenders it.

1. Matt Grossmann talks with Ryan Burge and John C. Green about politics and the decline of religion in the U.S.

2. Danielle Resnick at the Monkey Cage on the election in Zambia.

3. Paul Musgrave on Biden and Henry Clay.

4. Amanda Terkel, Arthur Delaney and Tara Golshan on the failure to distribute federal aid for renters.

5. And Angelica Puzio on the post-pandemic office. 

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