Over the weekend, Obama appointed 15 officials to his administration without Senate confirmation. Thanks to Republican filibuster threats, the Senate had lagged an average of seven months on each of these uncontroversial appointments. While simply getting these officials to work is for the good of the country, Obama also used the occasion as an object lesson in bipartisanship. Some of the "holds" Republicans placed on these nominees weren't germane -- problems with an unrelated federal project, concerns about earmarks. Some, however, were ideological: In the case of Craig Becker, the president's nominee to the National Labor Relations Board, Republicans objected because Becker had previously worked for unions. To their minds, managing relations between labor and business only requires understanding the business point of view. A year ago, the president decided to make a deal with Republican Sen. Mike Enzi: Support Becker, and I'll nominate your pick, Brian Hayes, a business-side labor lawyer who had worked for Enzi's committee staff. Obama followed through, but Enzi pulled his support, and his vote, double-crossing the president and leaving the NLRB with only two of its five members. The panel is so dysfunctional that the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, of all people, recently intimated that Obama should use recess appointments to fill it. So when the president issued his appointments over the weekend, he included Becker and another labor lawyer, Mark Pearce, but not Hayes. This is the president's effort to teach the Republicans bipartisanship, similar to using the reconciliation process to pass the health-care bill. One Republican seems to get it; as Sen. Bob Corker's recent comments about financial reform reflected: If you want to be constructive, compromise is an option, but if you renege on a deal, we'll go it alone.
--Tim Fernholz