[Friday Musical Interludes] Advocacy chief among Obama recess appointments

Posted on | August 20, 2010 | Comments Off

As a general matter of principle, I don’t much like recess appointments. I’ll admit, I also don’t like the way partisan politics has caused any number of Presidents to have trouble filling critical posts in the government, either.

kellen_winslow

But I digress.

In this particular case, however, I have to applaud President Obama for his decision to make a recess appointment of Dr. Kellen Winslow Winslow Sargeant …

no, wait, that’s not him …

Ah! There he is!

winslow_sargeant

… to be Chief Counsel of the SBA office of Advocacy. Sargeant and three other Obama nominees, all of whom had been waiting for an average of 303 days for Senate confirmation according to the White House, got the nod yesterday.

In the particular case of Dr. Sargeant, the President nominated him in March 2009, at the same time that he nominated Peggy Gustafson to be Inspector General of the SBA. Peggy sailed to confirmation but an “unknown” Senator placed a hold on Dr. Sargeant’s nomination, preventing a straight up and down vote

(Pause for musical interlude … )

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and effectively putting it (and Dr. Sargeant and his family) into limbo for more than a year.

The public objection was that Sargeant is not an attorney and some lawmakers — among them being Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Ranking Member Olympia Snowe (ME) — questioned his ability to effective monitor federal regulations without the legal background.

That’s a pretty thin objection, as many of us have recognized. For one thing, the position is not required by statute to be filled by an attorney. For another, Advocacy has plenty of lawyers on staff, so the fact that the Chief Counsel wasn’t one, too, needn’t be an issue.

Besides, Sargeant had the support of all sorts of interested folks for this job, most notably from his immediate predecessor, Tom Sullivan. Speaking personally, if Tom thinks Dr. Sargeant is qualified for the job, that’s good enough for me.

Then again, there have been rumors, too — persistent but unsubstantiated — about some discontent among Committee Republicans who remain unnamed but who preferred some other equally nameless candidate for the job, causing them to block this nomination.

All rather cloak and dagger, yes? And plausible but not especially credible.

Be any of that as it may, this particular game of Political Chicken is over with these recess appointments. I hope to get a chance to talk to the new Chief Counsel early next week, after he is sworn in.

Meanwhile, I’ll just say, “Congratulations, Dr. Sargeant! Welcome aboard.”

Not a bad note upon which to end the week, wot? Happy Friday, folks!


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