WASHINGTON – Accusing Republicans of foot-dragging on key administration appointments because they want to “score political points,” President Obama said Saturday he will fill 15 positions in a way that lets him bypass the Senate voting on their confirmation.
Former Hoosier congresswoman Jill Long Thompson was included in the list. Obama nominated her in mid-October to be a member of the Farm Credit Administration Board. The Senate Agriculture Committee recommended she be confirmed, but a senator blocked the confirmation vote – along with several other Agriculture Department nominations – over a dispute with the agency.
Under Senate rules, a single senator can hold up a nomination. Breaking that hold requires 60 votes and many hours of debate time. When the Senate takes a vacation, the president has the option of filling openings with “recess appointments.” People appointed under that process can serve until the end of the year.
The Senate began a two-week recess when it finished voting Friday.
“The United States Senate has the responsibility to approve or disapprove of my nominees. But if, in the interest of scoring political points, Republicans in the Senate refuse to exercise that responsibility, I must act in the interest of the American people and exercise my authority to fill these positions on an interim basis,” Obama said.
The White House said there are 217 nominees pending before the Senate for an average of 101 days, including 34 nominees pending for more than six months and that “Obama administration appointees have faced an unprecedented level of obstruction in the Senate.”
Although Long Thompson’s nomination was not controversial, one of Obama’s recess appointments provoked strong GOP reaction.
All 41 Senate Republicans signed a letter to Obama last week urging him not to use a recess appointment for a nominee for the National Labor Relations Board.
The GOP senators said Craig Becker, a former top lawyer with Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO, is too pro-labor.
Only two seats of the five-member NLRB are filled. During a Supreme Court argument Tuesday on whether those two can issue decisions on their own, Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to encourage the White House to use recess appointments to fill the vacancies.
“And the recess appointment power doesn’t work why?” he asked.
The list of 15 recess appointments includes Becker and another member of the labor board.
The Farm Credit Administration that Long Thompson will join is an independent federal agency responsible for examining and regulating the Farm Credit System. The agency’s policies are set by the three-member, full-time board.
It regulates and examines the banks, associations and related entities of the Farm Credit System. Board members are paid about $153,000.
Long Thompson, who ran rural development programs as an undersecretary of agriculture during the Clinton administration, is also the former chief executive officer of the Washington-based National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy.
She was raised on a farm in Whitley County and received a doctorate in marketing from Indiana University before entering Democratic politics. She won a special election in 1989 when Dan Coats, the congressman from northeast Indiana, was appointed to the Senate to fill a vacancy created when Sen. Dan Quayle became vice president.
She was defeated in 1994 by Republican Mark Souder.
Obama said that most of the people on the recess appointment list were approved by Senate committees months ago, yet still await a vote of the Senate.
