Braking Government

After eight years of secrecy, incompetence, indecency, and a belief that government is inherently bad and the free market is inherently good, America elected Barack Obama whose philosophy begins with a different assumption: that government should serve the interests of the people. As a brilliant politician with an ambitious agenda to set the country right again, Obama has attracted to government some especially bright, and qualified, personnel.

According to CQ Politics, President Obama has been making these essential appointments at record speed. However, confirmation by the Senate is necessary to place these top officials in the bureaucracies that need to be functioning in order to move the ship of state. And the Senate is dragging its feet. Even though the Senate is now controlled by Democrats.

Obama is filling these vacancies faster than any recent president, but the pace isn't fast enough, especially after the debacle of the Bush administration.

A tally by the White House Transition Project, a group of academics funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that after 160 days in office, a mark that came during the July Fourth congressional recess, less than 40 percent of the most plum political jobs had been filled and that Obama had sent nomination papers to the Senate for slightly more than half of the jobs.

Finally Harold Koh, former dean of Yale Law School, was confirmed by the Senate to become Legal Counsel to the State Department. A more worthy choice would be hard to find, but the Republicans managed to question this amazing scholar's credentials because he is also an activist.

And also troubling is the delay of the confirmation of Dawn E. Johnsen to be the Director of the Office of Legal Counsel, the same office that under Bush-Cheney authored the infamous torture memos that might, hopefully, send some people to prison for violating domestic and international law. Those memos are a perversion of legal analysis and should be used in every legal ethics class to illustrate how professionalism means standing up to power and saying no when asked to rationize illegality. Because Professor Johnsen testified before the Senate about just how much the Office of Legal Counsel had been derailed, Republicans have branded her a radical.

With Obama's popularity slipping, in the wake of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase's announcement of record quarter profits after taxpayers bailed them out (under the Bush administration, remember, not by Obama) while unemployment continues to rise and foreclosures do, too, we need to get government seats filled with the best and the brightest. Now. There is so much to do and not a lot of time to do it.