A fine selection

WASHINGTON

I gave President Obama some grief last summer for bypassing the Senate and making a precipitous recess appointment for Donald Berwick, his choice to oversee the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

I have a completely different take on the president’s latest such move, to issue a recess appointment for James Cole to serve as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 position at the Justice Department.

This time around, the maneuver was justified.

Process

My assessment has nothing to do with the individuals or positions involved, everything to do with the differences in process. Berwick had been nominated a mere three months before the president chose to appoint him while the Senate was not in session. His Senate vetting was not complete.

By contrast, Cole was nominated in May. His confirmation hearing took place in June. The next month, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted — albeit along party lines — to approve the nomination and send it to the Senate floor. Where it languished until the recess appointment, part of a batch issued by the president this week.

Deputy attorney general is the chief operating officer of the Justice Department, responsible for its day-to-day management. A vacancy there matters, and the vacancy created by the Senate’s thumb-twiddling on Cole was unprecedented in length in the modern Justice Department. Back during the Reagan administration, a nominee for the job had a 61-day lag. Cole waited 219 days.

Obstruction has become the reflexive norm, not a tactic reserved for the most egregious situations.The case against Cole was flimsy — alleged softness in the war on terror, as reflected in a 2002 op-ed piece, and alleged failure, as an outside monitor for AIG, to uncover wrongdoing at the company outside the scope of what he was supposed to be reviewing.

Washington Post Writers Group