ACSBlog

by Norman J. Ornstein, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann are authors of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. 

Few members of the Senate have professed more concern about dysfunction in the nomination and confirmation process than Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). Alexander is a wonk who cares about policy-making and problem solving. And, most importantly, it gets personal with Lamar -- he had his own unpleasant experience with the Senate's long-broken confirmation process when he came up as a nominee for Secretary of Education. Commendably, Lamar worked in a bipartisan fashion last year, with Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and others to streamline the process by removing a number of lower level executive nominees from the requirement for Senate confirmation.

What has happened to that Lamar Alexander? His persona seems to have been kidnapped and replaced by partisan warrior Lamar Alexander, participating in a series of abuses of the confirmation process that are both denying a president elected by a wide margin from selecting his own people to serve and attempting to block agencies from being able to function by filibustering or applying blanket holds to clearly qualified nominees -- what Tom Mann and I have called the new nullification.

We have seen the latter both with the NLRB, ever since Obama became president in 2009, and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency charged with implementing Obamacare, since the Affordable Care Act was enacted. Faced with the prospect of a National Labor Relations Board actually functioning and making decisions that reflected the majority, Republicans in the Senate filibustered to block any nominees, no matter how qualified, to prevent the agency from having a quorum. Frustrated after a long period of such behavior, Obama used recess appointments to get the agency working-- and then had to deal with a sweeping appeals court decision, written by the highly partisan judge David Sentelle, the same judge who fired competent and fair-minded Whitewater Independent Counsel Robert Fiske and replaced him with Kenneth Starr, outlawing almost all recess appointments. The decision is under appeal, but Alexander is calling for the removal of Obama-named commissioners, and also calling for them to be blocked from re-nomination in the future, before the court case has been finally litigated. 

by Jeremy Leaming

Beyond barking about alleged Obama administration ethical lapses, congressional Republicans are continuing to cultivate the primary purpose of their agenda – obstruct, hobble and otherwise prevent all three branches of government from functioning.

Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-K.Y.) early in President Obama’s first term told a right-wing gathering that Republicans’ primary goal was to prevent a second Obama term. Obviously that goal was not met.

Nevertheless, the Republican Party, which has grown even more exclusive, largely concerning itself with the interests of the super wealthy or corporate interests, is bent on doing everything it can to ensure that any efforts to help the middle class and the poor do not make much headway.

One way to do this is to fight efforts to change the make-up of the federal courts, to ensure they remain as business friendly as possible. That’s part of the reason why Senate Republicans have obstructed Obama’s judicial nominations and created a crisis on the federal bench with vacancies hovering over 80 for years. As noted here the president has not been able to place a judge on the august U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and there are four vacancies on the 11-member court. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, has introduced legislation to cut the number of judges on the court to 8.

But the obstruction doesn’t stop there. The federal agency charged with carrying out the National Labor Relations Act has been under a constant stream of attack by Republican senators. The five-member board cannot operate without a quorum and after the Republican-controlled D.C. Circuit ruled earlier this year that two of the Board’s members, Richard Griffin and Sharon Block, were improperly appointed during a Senate break, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) has been calling for them to resign. Doing so would effectively shutter the National Labor Relations Board until the appeals court process runs its course. And by the way, the D.C. Circuit’s opinion in Canning has been widely blasted as resting on wobbly legal grounds. Moreover, the opinion runs counter to other Circuit court rulings on recess appointments, and the Obama administration has appealed it the U.S. Supreme Court. The president has not asked for their resignations, nor should he.