In class we discussed Weingast and Moran's piece in which they argued that Congressmen possess awards and sanctions sufficient to create an effective incentive system regarding agency behavior. Weingast and Moran recognize the evidence for agency autonomy, claiming that the evidence is consistent with their theory of congressional dominance.The focus of this post is on a specific point brought up in class regarding one of the incentives used by Congress. Representatives utilize confirmations to encourage or discourage bureaucrats from pursuing or ignoring certain policies. The example mentioned in class today dealt with Supreme Court Justices. These bureaucrats are motivated to act certain ways due to the incentives of confirmations.
Professor Coppock mentioned how this might initially look to violate one of the observations stated to support agency autonomy, namely that perfunctory confirmations of agency heads remains the norm in political practice. In response, he mentioned the vetting process potential justices go through before being sent to the Congress for confirmation. I believe this clip from the West Wing, Season 5 Episode 7 illustrates accurately this idea of incentives that Congressmen have over this specific bureaucracy. The President is speaking to the current Chief Justice about potential Supreme Court nominees and the two men discuss the inability to nominate who they would like because of the unwillingness of Congress to confirm such individuals. This shows that the observation of perfunctory confirmation holds true while the Congress remains dominate over this agency through the incentive of confirmations.
2 comments:
I think the Senate's ability to block the nomination of a Supreme Court nomination is vastly underrated. Where as agency head's can be substituted in and out, Supreme court justices serve for life. The combination of the Republican Party seizing control of the Senate and the failure of this Congress to reach bipartisan agreements on seemingly anything, this could have huge impacts on Supreme Court. Now that Obama is a lame duck president, Democratic justices will be looking to retire. If one does, the Senate will assuredly block any of Obama's Democratic nominations and create a stalemate. Theoretically there would 8 judges, and because Obama would be unable to nominate a new judge, Supreme court could be set up to have 4-4 ties on many of their votes creating a deadlock in both our Legislative and Judicial branches of government.
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