Senate mulls change in nominee-approval process

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

George Washington had someone in mind to be a naval officer in Savannah. Georgia’s two senators wanted their guy in the job. The first president lost that fight with the inaugural Senate.

In the years since, the way of naming and confirming the nation’s top officials hasn’t become much smarter. More of a problem, in fact.

President George W. Bush had only about half his political appointees on the job at the time of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in early 2009 found himself dealing with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression without his team of deputies in place. The attempted bombing of an American airliner on Christmas Day 2009 occurred when the Transportation Security Administration was without an administrator.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican leader Mitch McConnell, in a rare moment of agreement, opened the new Congress this month by endorsing a bipartisan effort to find ways to improve an unwieldy, unproductive system.

It’s a challenge because there are so many ways to bog down a nomination.

Reid noted that the slow-moving Senate is responsible for confirming 1,215 executive-branch nominees, and the number keeps rising. Brookings Institution senior fellows E.J. Dionne Jr. and William Galston wrote in a study that the number of core policy positions the president must fill has risen from 295 when Ronald Reagan took office to 422 for Barack Obama.

Then there’s the onerous screening process, even for lower-level appointees. It’s meant that an administration can take months to send a nomination to the Senate for confirmation. Finally, there’s the increasingly partisan Senate, where a single lawmaker has the power to bottle up a nomination for months or kill it, sometimes for reasons unrelated to the person in line for the job.

Louisiana’s two senators stood in the way of nominations last fall to protest the freeze on offshore drilling after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The White House said there would be a one-week delay in making public the president’s budget proposal this year, partly because Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., had blocked a vote on Obama’s choice to be budget director, Jack Lew, for more than a month.