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Justice

Dawn Johnsen: My Nomination Was Blocked To Score ‘Political’ Points Against Obama On Terrorism

By Ian Millhiser on Jun 9, 2011 at 10:00 am

In a must-read article about the broken confirmations process in the Senate, Dave Weigel quotes former Office of Legal Counsel nominee Dawn Johnsen explaining that conservative objections to her failed nomination had nothing to do with actual disagreements with her views:

“I’m not going to talk about any individual meetings with senators,” [Johnsen] says, “but the impression that I got was it wasn’t about me, that it wasn’t personal. It was political. And there were some senators who were very open about that. It wasn’t a difference in substantive views. The things I was attacked for saying about torture, for example—Lindsey Graham and John McCain have talked about that the same way.” (Neither publicly supported her nomination.) “You definitely need to look at how all the terrorism issues and nominees who dealt with terrorism issues were treated. The attempt was to describe President Obama’s approach as not sufficiently tough on terrorism, and make that a political issue.“

And Johnsen is hardly the only Obama nominee that became the focus of a smear campaign despite no legitimate objections to her fitness for public service. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) accused failed judicial nominee Goodwin Liu of wanting to use the courts to turn America into “communist-run China,” and a law review article that became the centerpiece of the conservative claim that Liu was a judicial activist was in many ways a call for judicial restraint. Similarly, while no one on the right has provided a plausible explanation for why Peter Diamond’s nomination to the Fed board needed to be blocked, Sen. Richard Shelby’s (R-AL) claim that the Nobel Prize-winning economist was unqualified is obviously absurd.

Johnsen, Liu, and Diamond can at least say that their nominations were high-profile enough that people noticed the campaign of obstruction against them. The sad truth is that many nominees simply die a quiet death as senators delay their confirmation votes into oblivion. Indeed, this silent obstructionism caused Obama to have a lower percentage of his judicial nominees confirmed during his first two years in office than any other president in American history.

Weigel’s piece concludes with an uncharacteristically smart idea by Manuel Miranda, the disgraced former Senate staffer best known for hacking Democrats’ computer servers and stealing confidential documents. Miranda proposes allowing nominees at the rank of assistant secretary or lower to begin doing their job before they are confirmed by the Senate. Doing so would be a real step towards preventing the hollowing out of government we are currently witnessing.

 

Economy

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Peter Diamond Withdraws Fed Nomination Due To GOP Obstruction

By Ian Millhiser on Jun 6, 2011 at 9:15 am

Richard Shelby thinks this Nobel laureate is unqualified to set monetary policy.

Last year, Federal Reserve Board nominee Peter Diamond won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Nevertheless, Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL) has held up Diamond’s nomination because he deemed the Nobel laureate too unqualified to help set economic policy. Yesterday, after it became clear that the Republican caucus would back Shelby and prevent his confirmation, Diamond published an op-ed announcing that he would withdraw his nomination — and taking a shot at the economically challenged Republicans who blocked his confirmation:

[W]e should all worry about how distorted the confirmation process has become, and how little understanding of monetary policy there is among some of those responsible for its Congressional oversight. We need to preserve the independence of the Fed from efforts to politicize monetary policy and to limit the Fed’s ability to regulate financial firms.

Concern about the (seemingly low) current risk of future inflation should not erase concern about the large costs of continuing high unemployment. Concern about the distant risk of a genuine inability to handle our national debt should not erase concern about the risk to the economy from too much short-run fiscal tightening. [...]

Skilled analytical thinking should not be drowned out by mistaken, ideologically driven views that more is always better or less is always better. I had hoped to bring some of my own expertise and experience to the Fed. Now I hope someone else can.

Diamond is correct to worry about an oversight process where key players possess neither the knowledge to do their job nor the humility to get out of the way of people who do. Shelby’s absurd claim that a man who was recently recognized as one of the world’s leading economists is unqualified to sit on the Fed does nothing more than reveal Shelby’s lack of seriousness. And, on the House side, monetary policy oversight is even worse. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), who chairs the subcommittee overseeing monetary policy, has claimed that paper money is “nothing short of counterfeiting,” and has even called the U.S. dollar unconstitutional.

Nor is this disease limited to monetary policy oversight. Republicans clearly know nothing about the Constitution. Leading Republicans have called everything from child labor laws to the ban on whites only lunch counters to the minimum wage to Pell Grants and federal student loans to Social Security and Medicare unconstitutional. And yet these same Republicans have demanded a sweeping veto power over President Obama’s judicial nominees. As a result, the Senate confirmed fewer judges in Obama’s first two years than in the same period in any new presidency in American history.

This is a recipe for disaster. If Senate Republicans want to actually take the time to learn something about the matters they oversee, than they have a duty to bring their expertise to bear in judging nominations. So long as they insist upon valuing ideology over knowledge, however, they should keep their ignorant hands away from things that they clearly do not understand.

Politics

Fed Nominee Whom Sen. Shelby Deemed Too Unqualified To Confirm Wins Nobel Prize

By Ian Millhiser on Oct 11, 2010 at 1:55 pm

Richard Shelby thinks this Nobel laureate is unqualified to set monetary policy.

Richard Shelby thinks this Nobel laureate is unqualified to set monetary policy.

Earlier today, Federal Reserve Board nominee Peter Diamond won the Nobel Prize in Economics along with two of his colleagues. Yet, despite the fact that President Obama nominated this Nobel laureate to the Fed nearly six months ago, his nomination is currently being blocked by just one senator. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) believes that this year’s winner of the highest honor in the economics profession is unqualified to actually set economic policy:

[U]nder an arcane procedural rule, the Senate sent Mr. Diamond’s nomination back to the White House on Thursday night before starting its summer recess. A leading Republican senator, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, said that Mr. Diamond did not have sufficiently broad macroeconomic experience to help run the central bank. [...]

As Mr. Shelby noted, Mr. Diamond is not a specialist in monetary economics — the control of the supply of credit and the setting of interest rates — which is the Fed’s traditional purview. But of the five current governors of the Fed, only two, Mr. Bernanke and the vice chairman, Donald L. Kohn, are academic economists who specialize in monetary economics. The other three include a former community banker, a former Wall Street executive and a legal scholar.

Shelby, of course, has a history of this kind of abuse of the Senate Rules to prevent eminently qualified nominees from being confirmed. Earlier this year, Shelby briefly took over 70 nominees hostage in an attempt to strongarm the administration into awarding a $35 billion defense contract to his state — although he later lifted these holds once they became politically embarrassing.

But Shelby, of course, is only able to get away with these kinds of shenanigans because the Senate’s rules are shockingly easy to abuse. Indeed, while it is common wisdom that 60 senators are required to get virtually anything done, the reality is much bleaker — most Senate business now requires all 100 senators to consent.

The reason for this is because dissenting senators can force the Senate to waste hours or even days effectively doing nothing in order to pass a single bill or confirm a single nominee. Indeed, as a recent Center for American Progress white paper explains, there isn’t enough time in two entire presidential terms to confirm all of a new president’s nominees by the time that president leaves office:

TyrannyofTime_webcharts-01

In other words, the entire government can be hollowed out by a tiny group of senators with a vendetta. Today, Sen. Shelby thinks that a Nobel laureate doesn’t know enough about economics, so that nominee must languish without an up or down vote.  Tomorrow, another senator could disapprove of a nominee’s haircut, and that alone may be sufficient to spike the nomination.

Yglesias

Diamond in the Rough

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 6, 2010 at 9:14 am

diamond

As I’ve been saying for months now, by far the most politically tractable way of boosting the economy is for (a) the Senate to confirm Barack Obama’s nominees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and (b) for those nominees to side with the “dovish” faction that wants to boost the economy. Replacing retrenchment-minded Senators with expansion-minded Senators would also work, but there’s no way for it to happen. Getting Fed Board nominees approved should be child’s play for the White House, but they had a curiously laid-back attitude about making these appointments in the first place, have been weirdly low-key about getting them confirmed, and it keeps not getting done:

The Senate sent the nomination of Peter Diamond, one of President Barack Obama’s three nominees for the Federal Reserve Board, back to the White House because of objections from at least one lawmaker.

The office of the executive clerk of the Senate said the procedural move occurred as part of actions taken on nominees without debate before the chamber left for a summer break. Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, said he expects the White House will resubmit the nomination.

While Diamond, 70, may still win confirmation, it’s a snag for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who once taught Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, the senior Republican on the Banking Committee, said last week that Diamond, while a “skilled economist,” may not be qualified to make decisions on monetary policy.

Shame on McConnell and his colleagues for doing this. Holding up crucial jobs over BS in a time of mass unemployment is horrifying. But at least they appear to appreciate the stakes. The longer the Fed stays deadlocked the longer the economy will stay stuck in neutral, and the better conservative challenger candidates will do in the fall. If Rahm Emanuel and Harry Reid don’t understand how this works, I’m sure Christina Romer could explain it between now and September 3.

Yglesias

A New Hope for the Fed

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 12, 2010 at 12:57 pm

As Paul Krugman argues today, the inaction of the Federal Reserve in the face of our economic problems is a bit puzzling because Ben Bernanke is closely associated with the view that aggressive action is possible in this kind of situation. Consequently, it’s not really clear why so little is being done.

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At least one possibility, however, is that Bernanke’s own views aren’t the same as those of the median member of the Fed’s Open Market Committee. If that’s true, then good news may be on the way since on Thursday the Senate Banking Committee is finally going to hold hearings on Barack Obama’s nominees for the Fed’s Board of Governors. It’s been frustrating to me to watch the Senate slow-walk this, and equally frustrating to see the administration make no effort to get them to do otherwise. Even more frustrating, there’s been very little scrutiny of what Sarah Bloom Raskin and Peter Diamond actually think about this subject (Janet Yellen is more of a known quantity). My hope is that their confirmation could be the impetus for the change we need, but at this point that’s really just a hope.

Yglesias

Janet Yellen Tapped for Fed Vice Chair

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 12, 2010 at 10:44 am

File-Janet_yellen

Reuters is reporting that San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Janet Yellen will be tapped to replace Donald Kohn as Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. She’s an excellent person and will do an excellent job, but as Brad DeLong observes this move doesn’t really change anything on the FOMC in a serious way since she’s already the President of the San Francisco Fed.

Indeed, depending on who her successor is there, the net impact could even be negative. Which is why it’s important that the administration move on filling the other two vacancies. The Reuters piece, however, contains the first reporting I’ve seen that the administration is in fact vetting people for these jobs and says Sarah Bloom Raskin, Peter Diamond, Jeremy Stein, David Scharfstein, and Laurence Ball. I don’t know anything about any of those people except for Peter Diamond, and the work of his that I know (Social Security stuff about two clicks right of Dean Baker) doesn’t seem terribly relevant to what the Fed does.

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