Obama’s ambassadorial nominees to Hungary and Argentina will
likely be voted on after Thanksgiving.
The vote for these two nominees has been delayed because both performed
poorly during their Senate confirmation hearings. These delays, as Weingast and Moran/Marshal
emphasize, are not typical Congressional behavior when dealing with
presidential nominees. Rather, as Weingast
and Moran argue, the president wants to appoint people who are likely to be
confirmed. Thus, the President sends his
nominees to Congress prior to their nomination in order to gauge Congress’s
reaction. Weingast and Marshall’s
interpretation of “perfunctory confirmations” is different because they posit
that nominees are typically confirmed in a rubber stamp fashion.
The
nominees are clearly not being approved in a rubber stamp fashion since their
confirmations were delayed. Further, since
the nominees are having issues in the formal hearing portion of the
confirmation process, it appears that they passed the pre-nomination informal
meetings with Congressmen. This means
that Obama likely expected the two nominees to be confirmed when he nominated them. The situation does not clearly
fit within either of the Weingast theories since both assume “perfunctory
confirmation.” It is possible that this
case is simply an outlier and serves as a counterexample to the theories put
forth by Weingast and Moran/Marshall.
1 comment:
I agree that the advice and consent of the Senate in this case goes against the evidence for the traditional view of bureacracy presented by Muller. In the traditional view of bureaucracy, the agency is isolated from government representatives and thus a principal-agent problem develops due to difficulty in monitoring. However, I believe this delay in nominee approval is an example that works with Weingast and Moran's model of Congressional dominance in the bureacracy. In their model, they posit that Congressmen can use incentives and sanctions to make governmental activity more responsive to their constituents. Thus, the advice and consent clause is utilized as a Senatorial incentive to hold out on approving appoiontees in order to create levereage in determining the way that an agency is run, and thus appeal to their constituents. Weingast and Moran state that "perhaps the most effective means of influence" Congress has is in its power to control who gets appointed or reappointed, and that confirmation hearings only seem perfunctory to traditional analysts (769).
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