Here’s hoping that Senate moves quickly to OK Cabinet nominees
OKLAHOMA Attorney General Scott Pruitt goes before a U.S. Senate committee Wednesday for his confirmation hearing to become administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. It figures to be interesting.
Pruitt has been a fierce critic of the EPA during his six years as Oklahoma’s AG, even filing suit against the agency when he has felt it overreached. This has made his nomination by President-elect Donald Trump all the more unsettling to progressive groups that helped push the anti-fossil fuel policies of the outgoing Obama administration.
No surprise, nine Democrats on the Senate’s environment and public works committee, before whom Pruitt will testify, are questioning potential conflicts Pruitt may have as they relate to the EPA.
In releasing Pruitt’s personal financial disclosure report last week, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics said it applied with applicable federal laws and rules. But in a letter to the office’s director, the Democrats contend that as attorney general, Pruitt “has blurred the distinction between official and political actions, often at the behest of corporations he will regulate if confirmed to lead the EPA.” In addition, Pruitt and members of his staff “have worked closely with fossil fuel lobbyists to craft his office’s official positions.”
This criticism is part of Democrats’ strategy to drag out the confirmation of many Trump’s Cabinet nominees for weeks, if not longer. And it’s unseemly, as former Republican U.S. Sens. Bob Dole and Trent Lott pointed out Monday in an op-ed in USA Today.
“The American people said with a bold voice on Election Day that they want Washington to get into gear,” Dole and Lott wrote. “Stalling the confirmation of presidential nominees en masse will be viewed, rightly, as just an extension of the petty politics that Americans are so strongly rejecting.”
They pointed out that in 1993, they were involved in the confirmation of President Bill Clinton’s Cabinet nominees. Each was confirmed within one day of Clinton’s inauguration. “In our view, if the president’s nominees were qualified in terms of education, experience and character, it was our duty to the country to allow him to begin his term with his Cabinet in place,” they wrote.
Lott and Dole noted that in 2001, even after the hard feelings stemming from the Florida recount, Democrats allowed President George W. Bush to get his Cabinet in place. Seven were on the job within hours of the inauguration. In 2009, seven of Barack Obama’s Cabinet picks were confirmed on Inauguration Day, with Hillary Clinton confirmed one day later as secretary of state and four others confirmed by the end of Obama’s first week in office.
Lott and Dole urged Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to “put the interests of the nation first, heed the Senate’s well-established traditions and obligations, and speedily confirm Trump’s Cabinet.”
It’s our hope that this indeed is what will happen.