Should nominees for federal office be speedily confirmed? The answer depends on which section of the Sunday Washington Post you pick up first. On the right-hand side of the front page (though it had vanished from the home page of the Post’s website by early afternoon) the headline read: “Ethics official warns against confirmations before reviews are complete.” The story notes that Walter Schaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics appointed to a five-year term by President Obama in 2013 after contributing $500 to Obama’s campaign, has responded to a letter from Democratic senators by writing that the schedule of confirmation hearings for President-elect Trump’s appointees is “‘of great concern to me because nominees have not completed a required ethics review before their hearings.”
But the next paragraph suggests that it is not the nominees but Schaub’s own office that has not completed its review. “The schedule ‘has created undue pressure on OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews,’ Shaub wrote in response to an inquiry by Democratic senators. ‘More significantly, it has left some of the nominees with potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings.'” All of which raises the question of whether the OGE was unaware that it was likely to get a heavy workload in the weeks preceding the inauguration of the next president. This exchange of letters, and the placement of the story on the Post’s Sunday front page, looks like a Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance attempt to delay confirmation of Trump appointees. The general message: The Senate should slow down approval of presidential appointees.
Turn to the Sunday Post’s Outlook section, however, and you get an entirely different message. The lead article here is headlined “My three maddening, futile years inside the broken Senate confirmation process.” The writer, Doug Wilson, was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by a Democratic-majority Senate in 2009 as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs and served until 2012. In 2013 he was nominated for a position reserved for Democrats on the U.S. Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy. But the process of preparing disclosure documents and getting interviews took months — all the months until Republicans won a Senate majority in the 2014 elections. Then Wilson was denied confirmation for lack of a “pair” — a Republican nominee that could be confirmed at the same time. If his story is accurate, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, Wilson’s experience was maddening; the appointment was for an unpaid advisory position for which he appears to have been highly qualified. But the general message of the story is the opposite of that of the front page story: The Senate should speed up approval of presidential appointees.
I draw two conclusions from the juxtaposition of these two stories. One is that there is a single general message that the Post wanted to deliver, or inadvertently delivered: The Senate should speed up approval of Democratic presidential appointees and slow down approval of Republican presidential appointees. That’s a lesson in line with the Post’s general operating procedure since Martin Baron became executive editor in December 2012.
The second lesson is one that the vetting process for presidential appointees has become ridiculously protracted. The effort to keep the occasional bad apple out of the barrel has resulted in keeping a much higher number of entirely acceptable apples out — and has left an uncomfortably large amount of empty space in the barrel. As Doug Wilson notes, the Senate does use its prerogative of granting or denying confirmation as a means of affecting public policy, as the framers of the Constitution undoubtedly expected when it first granted the Senate that prerogative. So be it. But the framers certainly didn’t anticipate that nominees would have to be subjected to the paperwork requirements they are subjected to today — and which surely cause more harm than they are worth. Which leads me to propound a general rule: All attempts to make processes fail-safe make them sure to fail.
So let’s eliminate the paperwork requirements for nominees to the U.S. Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy — and let’s not slow down the confirmation of Trump’s appointees to Cabinet positions.
