Why Are So Many of Obama's Cabinet Picks Facing Republican "No" Votes?
Sebelius is the fifth Obama cabinet nominee to encounter significant opposition. One (Tom Daschle) withdrew. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had 34 senators vote against him; Eric Holder had 21; and Hilda Solis had 17. Two other nominees (Hillary Clinton and Ron Kirk) had roll-call votes, with 2 and 5 negative votes.
With the exception of Geithner, senatorial opposition to Obama cabinet nominees has tended to focus on a distaste with the policies that the nominee would carry out under Obama--Holder on torture, Sebelius on health care and abortion rights, Solis on card check. This is a break from past administrations, and it's a potentially troubling development.
In 2001, just two Bush nominees even faced any opposition in roll-call confirmation votes: 42 senators opposed John Ashcroft, while 24 opposed Gale Norton. In both instances, opposition centered on the nominee's previous positions (Ashcroft's record on desegregation matters, Norton's affiliation with James Watt and the Sagebrush Rebellion) rather than a de facto commitment to vote against anyone the President happened to nominate for a particular cabinet slot.
Going back eight years to Bill Clinton's first cabinet, in a Senate with roughly the same number of Republicans (44) as today, no nominee faced dissenting votes--although, of course, Clinton's first choice as AG, Zoe Baird, had to withdraw for personal reasons.
Ronald Reagan's first batch of nominees didn't enjoy this type of unanimous backing--but they hardly faced strong opposition, either. The greatest resistance came to Labor Secretary William Donovan, against whom conflict of interest allegations had been raised. Donovan was confirmed 80-17.
What's going on here? One explanation, of course, is that Obama has simply chosen less qualified nominees than his predecessors, and the Senate has rightly insisted on imposing its checks and balanced. That doesn't seem like a credible explanation.
Instead, the growing partisan resistance to qualified cabinet nominees as a way of expressing distaste with the President's policies seems to be part of a broader trend in what congressional scholar Norm Ornstein has termed"our broken senate." As Ornstein documents, the current GOP minority has also dramatically increased the frequency of filibusters, transforming the Senate into a body requiring 60 votes on virtually any legislation--a sharp contrast to the situation even two decades ago.
While the Republicans have shown more aggressiveness on such procedural matters, it's hard to believe that the Democrats, if they return to the minority, will not employ the GOP's precedents. The result, sadly, will be an increasingly dysfunctional Senate.