Outwardly, Democrats express confidence about their chances of holding the United States Senate next week when voters head to the polls. Behind the scenes, their actions tell the opposite story.
Democratic Senate staffers are preparing for a very busy post-election “lame-duck” session before Americans’ new choices for Senate can be sworn in, the liberal news website Talking Points Memo reports. “We will definitely move a lot of nominees during the lame duck one way or the other,” an anonymous staffer told the publication, “possibly more if Republicans take the majority.”
This, along with President Obama’s decision to conceal his replacement for Attorney General Eric Holder until after the election, implies not only a majority that has quietly given up hope, but also an administration that would rather not be held accountable at election time for its personnel decisions.
Currently, there are 129 executive branch nomination pending in the U.S. Senate. The openings to be filled include a surgeon general and multiple ambassadors and assistant secretaries, undersecretaries and directors of various agencies and departments.
The question that should really be asked is, why the sudden rush? Senate Democrats have long possessed the votes to confirm all of these nominations. They eliminated their own excuse last year when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., with the backing of nearly his entire caucus, invoked the so-called “nuclear option,” abolishing any super-majority vote requirement for executive branch appointees. They therefore need only 51 votes at most to confirm any executive appointment.
Many of the nominations are not controversial — the only reason Reid’s caucus never got around to these is that he was wasting floor time this fall trying to undermine business owners’ religious freedom and repeal the First Amendment protection of political speech.
As for the relatively small number of controversial nominees — including Vivek Murthy, Obama’s underqualified pick for surgeon general — there is a separate reason they have not been confirmed. Several Senate Democrats did not want to vote on them before the coming election because they feared it could hurt their chances.
But with Reid putting off all controversial confirmation votes until after the election, Democratic Senators can breathe easy and stop worrying about accountability. They can vote with Obama even if it is against their constituents’ interests, as they have so often before, knowing either that their own careers have already ended or that the people they are confirming will be distant memories by the time they next face an election in six years.
Lame duck chicanery — which both parties have practiced in the past — is an abuse, a form of corruption that should be abolished by changes to House and Senate rules. It is inappropriate for the losers of an election to pretend they still command the governing mandate of a majority — or, even worse, to use their last moments in office to give voters a finger in the eye for snubbing them.
