Hubbard Radio Washington DC, LLC. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
Sizing Up the Obama Cabinet
A lawmaker, and a think-tank scholar weigh in on the nominees.
By Max Cacas
FederalNewsRadio
Senator Patrick Leahy, (D.-Vermont), has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, will hold confirmation hearings for Attorney General-designate Eric Holder very shortly after the 111th Congress convenes in early January. Holder is one of a growing list of Obama nominees who will face scrutiny next month from the United States Senate.
One of the lawmakers who will pass the first round of judgement on Holder’s nomination in the Judiciary Committee is Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat. During a reporters roundtable on Capitol Hill late last week, Cardin talked about the Holder nomination.
(He’s) a very fine person. Very qualified to be Attorney General of the United States. I anticipate that I will be supporting his confirmation. But I think its very, very important that we have the type of committments through the confirmation process that he will restore to the Department of Justice the independence that is essential to that agency. The Attorney General is not the attorney general for the President. The Attorney General is for the nation. We need to get on the record his committment that his advisory opinions are objective, and are not pressured by the administration.
For a different perspective on the Holder nomination, we talked to Mike Tanner, a senior scholar at the Cato Institute here in Washington.
I think Eric Holder represents a ‘throwback’ to the way attorney generals used to be nominated, and were under the Bush Administration, as well, where they were picked as much for their loyalty to the President, rather than independence, or someone who was going to be a law enforcement official for the United States. Presidents don’t normally like independent attorneys general. Eric Holder didn’t display any particular independence during his time in the Clinton administration, and he seems to have been selected largely for the symbolism of his being an African-American, and his closeness to Barack Obama.
One of the most highly visible nominations for the President-elect was his decision to name Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D.-NY) – his primary opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination – to be his Secretary of State. Senator Cardin, who also sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, looks ahead at the reception she is likely to get from her former colleagues.
I think Senator Clinton will get some questions a lot of people are going to want to ask. I think she’ll go through a pretty rigorous confirmation process. At the end of the day, I’m pretty confident that she’ll be confirmed. I think the Senate and the American people are very fortunate to have a person of her experience and caliber willing to take on the challenges of Secretary of State. It was a difficult decision on her part to give up a seat in the United States Senate. I think she did this for all the right reasons, and at the end of the day, the Senate, by very large margins, is going to confirm her as Secretary of State.
Cato’s Tanner believes Senator Clinton’s nomination represents a shrewd gamble for the President-elect.
I think Senator Clinton will be a very high-profile Secretary of State, someone who is known very well all around the world. And when she speaks, she will have a certain amount of clout on her own. On the other hand, she is also someone who is accustomed to pursuing her own agenda, and whether or not she is going to be able to submerge that agenda to the Obama agenda is something we’ll have to watch.
In a way, he gets kind of a ‘two-fer’ by appointing her Secretary of State. On the one hand, he gets to make amends with the voters who supported her in a very close Democratic primary. These are people he wants to have on board in his coalition. On the other hand, he gets her out of the Senate, where she might have made mischief on issues like health care, where she had staked a claim. So, this is one way to ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer’.
As a former Maryland Congressman who served on the House Ways and Means and Budget Committees, Senator Cardin is very familiar with Peter Orzag, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office who has been tapped to head the Office of Management and Budget by Mr. Obama.
I think Peter Orzag will be a great addition to the President-elect’s cabinet. I know how committed he is to fiscal discipline. I think Senator Obama is very committed to fiscal discipline. I think he’s prepared to make some very difficult decisions.
In a similar vein, the nomination of Peter Orzag to OMB meets the approval of Cato’s Mike Tanner.
I know Peter Orzag well, he’s a brilliant man, he is a very solid economist. He’s certainly left of center, but he’s also someone who has paid attention, and raised the alarm about the looming entitlement crisis. He’s probably a very good pick in this regard.
Several weekends ago, President-elect Obama shocked most of official Washington by announcing that he would re-appoint Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to hold the same position in his administration, at least for the first year. And that’s a decision Cardin endorses.
I was one of those who encouraged the transition team to recognize Secretary Gates for reappointment,” he told reporters, adding that Gates has been a very good source of information to lawmakers, and has always provided his best advice. The Maryland Democrat also applauds Gates’ previous statements that the U.S. needs to depend as much on improved international diplomacy as military strength to be safe.
Cato’s Mike Tanner feels that, for one thing, Gates’s re-appointment represents the continuation of a trend in recent administrations of having at least one member of the cabinet come from the opposition party (Democrat Norm Mineta served as Transportation Secretary during most of the Bush administration), even though Gates is a registered independent.
He is certainly somebody who has brought stability and new thinking to the Pentagon at a time when it was needed,” he said, adding that the President-elect wanted the military chain of command to feel comfortable with him. Tanner feels that the Gates re-appointment is “a very good move on his part.”
——
On the Web:
(Copyright 2008 by FederalNewsRadio.com. All Rights Reserved.)
Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
USPS supervisors fear ‘exodus’ among their ranks, but data shows high retention
