The Storm Is Already Here

The New York Times headlines that storm clouds are gathering for Obama nominations.

Senate Republicans are struggling to adapt to an altered political world when it comes to candidates for federal courts and senior Justice Department posts.

No longer able simply to defend choices made by a fellow Republican, as they did under President George W. Bush, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have turned into vocal critics of many of President Obama’s legal nominees. They complain that several are committed liberal ideologues, much in the way Democrats complained that Mr. Bush’s choices were committed conservative ideologues.

But so far, facing a solid Democratic majority in the Senate, they have been able to do little beyond briefly delaying confirmation. Now they are weighing whether to use the filibuster — a threat of extended debate, the tool many Republican senators regularly denounced when it was used by Democrats to block some Republican nominees. These are certainly different times.

The current Republican focus is on a pair of nominees: Mr. Obama’s first selection for a federal appeals court seat, David F. Hamilton, and his choice to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, Dawn Johnsen. (By coincidence, the two are in-laws.)

The New York Times is only noticing this now? How can anyone ignore the multiple nominees who had tax troubles and were forced to withdraw or the ones that were picked and are doing a bangup job (Great Job Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner!).

Of course there are storm clouds gathering. They've been gathering since the moment Obama's vaunted nomination vetting process went off the rails from Day 1. No word on when Obama will fill all the slots at Treasury either.

The problems are only going to mount for the Obama Administration as the GOP finally finds its voice and hits upon tactics that can slow down the Administration's push to impose its will over all aspects of the economy and the legal system with its judicial nominees. Given how the Democrats refused to give due deference to qualified jurists who had a conservative position, the GOP will respond in kind. Nominees will be bottled up and judicial positions will go unfilled, just as they had done during the Bush Administration, except that the Democrats will be able to allow President Obama to provide recess appointees, skirting the GOP efforts.

The GOP's losing hand is due to self-inflicted inability to provide a fiscally responsible position and years of corruption caught up. The Democrats are already there on the corruption front, but are fully in control of the wheels of government. It will take years to fix the mess that the Democrats are piling up.