Top priorities for the White House include the confirmation in December of Jeh Johnson as secretary of homeland security, Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve, according to a White House official. Obama also hopes for quick confirmation of three nominees to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit....And then?
“There is no document; there is no blueprint,” said Robert Raben, a prominent Democratic lawyer close to the White House. “In terms of a strategy, everybody’s blinking really hard.”I guess "blinking really hard" means it was such a big surprise that they're still trying to wake up into the new reality. Or do you think it's blinking in the sense of losing one's nerve? They looked courageous, but then they blinked?
It would make more sense to say that the strategy must be to begin with the top priorities while continually observing the responses from the GOP and from the American people and developing the strategy as thing proceed. All along, the Democrats should be promoting their brand as the nominees themselves are presented as sound and highly competent, the Republicans attacks are made to seem scurrilous, and the people are manipulated into feeling as though the work of the government is going forward in a proper and beneficial way. The procedure should be used to distract attention from other less pleasant things — notably the Obamacare debacle (which itself might already be working to keep us from looking at even more unsettling matters).
If the Democrats can use this new confirmation process to good effect and they get lucky with a few Republicans looking arguably stupid or mean (not a bad bet), then more nominees can be advanced, perhaps even more advantageously as the moves of the game are learned and perfected.
How will Republicans play the game? They've already resisted confirming a bunch of "low-profile nominees by unanimous consent, as is customary in the Senate before an extended break." They can also absent themselves from committees so there's no quorum, which is needed to move the nominations to the floor. There's the "blue slip" procedure requiring each judicial nominee to get approval by both of their home state Senators. On the Senate floor, there can be up to 30 hours of debate time for every appeals court and Cabinet-level nominee and 8 hours for other nominees. I can picture Ted Cruz finding 30 hours worth of things to say about any Obama judicial nominee. If it's done well, it could help Republicans, but the Democrats and the media will call everything obstructionist and cherry-pick anything to denounce as mean, stupid, evil, etc.
Republicans have not indicated which delaying tactics, if any, they might employ, but they signaled a desire to seek revenge after Thursday’s vote. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Democrats will “have trouble in a lot of areas, because there’s going to be a lot of anger.”...It's also only a matter of time until next year's elections, and we're already more or less in campaign mode. 30 (or even 8) hours is a lot of debate when you are talking about 242 nominees. And as the nasty, fired-up game proceeds, won't Republicans refine their moves? Pick which debates you want on the floor.
On nominations, Raben said, the change in filibuster rules means that political fights are more likely to take place at the committee level. “Background investigations, courtesy visits, hearings and committee markups around nominees take on heightened importance because once it gets to the floor, absent a horrific fact about a nominee where significant numbers of the majority won’t defend it, it’s only a matter of time,” Raben said.
Obama’s aides said the president hopes the change in filibuster rules will get business back to usual, allowing him to staff his administration and fill the federal judiciary with nominees of his choosing without delay.Obama and hope, a dreary old theme, newly hollowed out.
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