Rational And Fair Process Called For
When President Clinton sent Bill Lann Lee up the middle against the Senate Judiciary Committee, they stopped him at the line of scrimmage. So Clinton used an end run to make Lee director - “acting” director, that is - of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Clinton’s controversial ploy avoids the need for a confirmation the Senate is unlikely to award, not because Lee is unqualified but because Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch and other conservative Republicans object to Lee’s support for affirmative action.
No big deal, cynics say. That’s just the way the game is played.
It is a big deal, however. Treating politics as a game - something both the White House and Congress do, something both political parties do - undermines public faith in government.
A 1996 report by the Twentieth Century Fund, a nonpartisan research institute, observed that it is taking longer and longer to confirm appointees who then serve for shorter and shorter terms.
“These trends are both a symptom and cause of the nation’s distrust of and alienation from the political system,” the report noted.
Like Clinton, President George Bush had his confirmation struggles with an opposition Senate. Both presidents considered but rejected the idea of making troublesome appointments while the Senate was in recess, a constitutional way of filling government jobs until the end of the Senate’s next session without benefit of confirmation.
But it was Clinton who chose to make an “acting” appointment which is good for 120 days but can be repeated indefinitely - potentially without ever having to worry about confirmation. To his credit, he says he’ll give the Senate another chance to act in 1998.
The Senate should respond in kind and, at the least, let the appointment go before the full body, something the Judiciary Committee has prevented so far.
More constructive yet, Congress and the White House should consider a package of recommendations in the Twentieth Century Fund report. Among them: Substantially reduce the number of government jobs that require presidential appointment and expedite the Senate confirmation process - set time limits, prohibit filibusters, stop letting individual senators put a hold on specific nominations.
When the architects of our Constitution devised its checks and balances, they decided it was better to let important appointments be made by one person, who would be ashamed to nominate unfit candidates, than by an assembly like the Senate, in which what Alexander Hamilton called “all the private and party likings and dislikes, partialities and antipathies, attachments and animosities” would overshadow the “intrinsic merit” of the nominee.
They also expected that the Senate, knowing the rejection of one presidential appointment would not assure a second one to their liking, would deny confirmation only with strong reason.
But then, Hamilton and the rest of the founding fathers hadn’t learned how to play the game.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Doug Floyd For the editorial board