Why would Dawn Johnsen want to work for Obama, or conversely why would Obama want her, given his stance on forgiving torture, continuing the imperial Presidency and lack of transparency in his Administration. At almost one year and counting, I’d think one with any integrity, given the lack of effort on the Administrations part pushing conformations, would remove their name from consideration and look for work elsewhere.

I’m not getting my hopes up but it would be nice if Obama grew a pair and started to push back on these nominations and other issues like healthcare, EFCA, free trade, transparency, lobbying, and reform of the whole damn sordid mess. And pass a jobs bill that would create jobs for christs sake.

I went door to door and voted for a man I thought was a half-assed liberal; not another damn moderate or Republican lite. Time will tell, but if he doesn’t start listening to the people that put him in the White House he’ll be a one term president. He still has time to redeem himself and a good place to start would be to rid himself of the corporatists he has surrounded himself with.

Great news, if it’s true. They must have been reading FDL :-) …

If the President would use the bully pulpit to talk seriously about reforming the Senate

maybe he’s finally getting worried about falling poll numbers, loss of base support…or am I overly hopeful??

If he really wanted the positions filled with his nominees, he would have made recess appointments. I think he is sending them back to the Senate as a ploy to make the progressives think he is serious.

Good point.

It certainly makes you wonder.

I’d be surprised to find out Obama cares about progressives that much.

I have to say I’m surprised, though. I was fairly sure he’d just let the nomination die.

I’m afraid to count on this happening – hve just about given up feeling optimistic about this man and his administration, but if it happens, and he puts some muscle behind it, it would be a big boost to my morale.

And if Rahm actually leaves to run for mayor of Chicago (or anything else), that would be another step up…

She’s really aged since the olympics.

I’m not holding my breath on this one. I’d bet the house it is just more pretty posturing by Obama that will be followed by nothing good.

… and promised Dems in Congress that they won’t have to make any “controversial” votes in 2010.

Shorter White House: this time, rubes, we really mean it.

Time to get these appointments through. No excuses.

I think he is sending them back to the Senate as a ploy to make the progressives think he is serious.

Christ in a fucking sidecar, it’s all just a fucking game to you people. C’mon, work the Rahm angle in there, too! Slacker…

I think it’s quite clear that Obama doesn’t care at all about progressives. What’s not so clear is what he does care about, though his actions put him squarely in the ConservaDem column.

Eric Holder isn’t much to brag about either. Several of these nominees belong to him; he’s holding the helm on a floundering ship that is the DoJ Bush pummeled with incompetents and politicization. What is Holder doing to drum up support inside the White House to get it to spend political capital, which it is losing fast?

The irony is that Republicans will rarely, if ever, cooperate with him, which is not news. What’s news is that Obama is fast losing capital because he is so namby pamby in pushing his people and an agenda he claims are his.

Were Obama to renominate Ms. Johnsen, for example, and show the same studied lack of interest in whether she’s appointed — and whether the OLC starts properly doing its job — Obama would be poking a stick in both eyes of his base and the DoJ, as well as in the eyes of potential future nominees. That would suggest a tone deafness at the White House and among top Democrats that would send them to the electoral funeral pyre come November 2010 and 2012.

Maybe he’s finally getting tired of the GOP mocking him, Lieberman and the DLC mocking him, the left pissed off at him, the right hating him, the independents abandoning him, his low approval ratings, the sudden retirement of Dorgan, and just not being respected at all by anyone.

We’ll see how well he handles the new year. Whether it’s more DLC, GOP lite crap or he re-engages the voters who put him in office. His base is furious at him, and with good reason.

I don’t think Dawn Johnsen is going to make it.

She’s defin1tely a “rule of law” critter and so all the previous OLC business about “Unitary Executive” and torture etc would be areas of interest to her, to set right.

Na.Ga.Ha.Pen.

Mayor Emmanuel?

Daley runs Chicago like an emperor. Rahm would love to be emperor of Chicago.

Ohio guy sounds like he works for Voinovich. Tell me, after Ms. Johnsen’s treatment all of last year, after Obama’s acceptance of much of the Bush regime’s myriad legal excesses, why on earth anyone should take these rumors at face value? Why should anyone cut Obama slack on this topic or take the perennial optimist’s wait and see attitude, and why should his supporters’ attitude should not be “Put up or shut up”?

Perfect – Put Up or Shut Up ! That should be our motto from now on. Short and to the point.

We’ll see.

For tejanarusa – thanks

If, and it’s a big if, Dawn Johnsen is re-nominated, one could view it with a skeptical eye and come to the conclusion that the Obama Administration, fully realizing they’ve deliberately diss’ed the entire Progressive base for all of the last year, has decided that all they have to do is throw Progressives a crumb in re-nominating Dawn Johnsen and that will “make it all better”.

Nice try Rahmbo, but no fookin’ cigar!

A campaign sop to progressives in an election year?

Most famous political machine evah, with a lot of copycats.

One wee one here, one wee one there. Not. Good. Enough.

Looks like Obama still wants to tax unions for his health care package, so he’s still working dilligently to alienate the base even further, assuring that they stay home in 2010.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100107/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_overhaul

Pretty meager offering, if that is the case. Might score a few points with his sycophants at DK and elsewhere.

It would also be nice if President Obama would pardon all those in jail for the same drugs he’s admitted using.

Think that’ll happen?

Why or why not?

You have any serious questions or are you just going to throw crap at the wall to see what sticks?

Because Ms. Johnson sees the need for a strong voice on these issues?

Now that would be nice.

I’m so with you. Put up or shut up…

As the old saying goes: all them smiles and dimples don’t count for nothin.

Ohio guy sounds like he works for Voinovich. Tell me, after Ms. Johnsen’s treatment all of last year, after Obama’s acceptance of much of the Bush regime’s myriad legal excesses, why on earth anyone should take these rumors at face value?

Oh, earl, you’ve unmasked me most fully. Tell me which hand I use? And what’s my favorite color?

Put up or shut up indeed. Or at least take a breath once in awhile, oxygen to the fucking shit for brains and all that.

When the honorable Ms Johnsen is mopping the motherfucking floor with Bush leftovers some years on, I’m resolute that all y’all will find something, anything, to piss and moan about. In my fantasy, she helps indict Rahm for exposing himself to elderly Russian immigrant washerwomen.

Bet you didn’t forecast that one, earl. =)

‘night, pups!

Absolutely. He can recess appoint them now and the appointment will last til the end of the 2011 Senate session unless the Senate gets off its ass and confirms the nomination in the meantime. And, with the Goopers determined to block everything in sight this session, there will be little that will move other than nominations. The Goopers are gonna look awfully silly opposing confirmation of someone who’s already been appointed to the position. This applies to judges too, although given that those are lifetime appointments there’s a somewhat valid case to be made for not recessing.

Her home state Senator, Lugar, says he’ll vote for her, so she has an insurance vote if one of the wet Dems goes south. She won’t have a problem getting 50.

Recess appointments are only good for the current session of Congress, which ends in Dec 2010.

As opposed to going until Dec 2010 with empty positions? I don’t see any way Obama can show he is serious about Re-Nominating without a few well placed recess appointments. Maybe TSA and OLC during the recess, and then re-nominate most of the rest for the next session to consider.

Obama is doing the right thing to re-nominate Johnsen,but he has to now push her through and to break some arms. He let her hang in the wind the first time and that was disgusting. She is a big opponent of the torturers and we need her in the OLC.

Oh, I wasn’t arguing against them, just correcting the term limit. I’ve wondered all along why he hasn’t used it. Short term solution but better than an empty position for sure.

When Dawn Johnsen (does anyone have a public hold on her?) and her 10% contingent start getting the Ben Bernanke/90% contingent treatment (he has three public holds on him), maybe I’ll start crediting the latest anonymous leaks from the backroom powers-that-be.

“I think the president’s overriding frustration has been… it is not simply that you see tactics purely to delay, purely to watch the clock wind around and around, but they don’t even appear to be philosophical,” Gibbs said on Wednesday. “When something gets filibustered and we take 30 hours to debate it and then the ultimate vote is 88 to 10, was the filibuster predicated on anything else than watching the clock wind around?… I think the president, I think the American people are frustrated by the lack of not getting anything done just to hear someone talk.”
- Executive Branch spokesman Robert Gibbs

Repeating what I consider to be the real cause of the complaints about the Senate – the avoidance of actual filibusters – at least until my assessment is proven wrong:

Mr. Gibbs (and Mr. Stein) -

1. There hasn’t been a real “filibuster” in the United States Senate since I don’t know when (the late 1980s?).

2. What Gibbs is referring to, instead, is a public or private objection to a unanimous consent request to proceed to some action, which prompts – usually sooner rather than later these days – the Democratic Majority Leader (and 15 of his colleagues) to file a cloture motion under Rule 22 of the Senate, for the purposes of bypassing a merely-threatened filibuster. Thus initiating the cloture motion’s built-in, painless days of delay and 60-vote supermajority, and avoiding engaging an actual filibuster (which builds in delay only for so long as the physical discomfort of the filibuster is endured) to obtain a subsequent simple-majority vote.

The cloture motion – when a Party (rarely) has the power of 60 votes, as the Democratic caucus now does – happens to conveniently permit the majority Party to wholly ignore the minority Party and its concerns, leading to obvious reciprocation via abuse of the only power (slowing things down) that the minority has left.

Abraham Lincoln:

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a [Majority Leader's] character, give him power.

3. If anyone at the White House was observing Senate floor proceedings or consulting with Senate staffers who did, they might have noticed that the minority Republicans voluntarily allowed the Rule 22-mandated “30″ post-cloture hours of “debate” to mostly lapse, unused, repeatedly, while the Senate stood adjourned for the night and worked on other business (like caucus luncheons), in the lead-up to the Christmas Eve vote. Which actually sped things up by a couple of weeks (of Mon-Fri sessions) that the cloture rules [see Page CRS-20] would otherwise have permitted them to use to delay the final vote – all without conducting an actual filibuster. [NB: The Republican caucus has its obstruction limits too, especially when a bill is so friendly to its long-time campaign contributors.]

4. “Hearing someone talk” (and listening and responding to them) is the essence of democratic debate. Those who have no interest in seeing democracy in action, in public, have no business in or around a national legislature. Which, unfortunately, appears to encompass most of the Party members who play-act the role of federal representatives in our Congress. Furthermore, as Gibbs well knows, out of hundreds of (Democratic and Republican) amendments filed in the Senate for floor debate, only about 20 were ever allowed to be called up for debate or a vote, and of those only about 2 substantive amendments were actually adopted (with 60 votes, though no cloture motions had been filed) after weeks of make-believe “legislating” on the Senate floor. Just like in the undemocratic House, where one substantive floor amendment – out of hundreds offered by its membership – was allowed by the Speaker’s Rules Committee to reach the House floor for passage (Stupak/Pitts) during the one day of floor “debate” on this major piece of legislation, whose passage was a foregone conclusion before it ever reached the floor.

What Mr. Gibbs is really saying is that there’s not much point in “talking” when the talking is falling on deaf ears and Party power has already strangled the legislative amendment process. And he’d be right; hard to disagree with that.

The real question that needs answering is whether that paucity of legislating is the fault of the Senate and its unused democratic processes, or whether it’s the fault of the leadership of the two political Parties, who abuse their power to end-run democratic self-government in favor of the backroom deal.

Ella’s right; this is a ploy, aka bullshit. Obama wants to pretend to court the progressives after a year of ignoring or actively dissing us. There’s no place for a principled person like Dawn Johansen in this PR-driven, corporatist, principle-free White House. I’d be surprised if she agreed to play the puppet again, to be humiliated TWICE. President Blue Dog needs a wake-up call.

I’m from Ohio too, and frankly, “Guy,” you don’t make much sense. If you imagine Dawn Johansen will ever be heading the OLC and “mopping the floor with Bush leftovers,” you’re delusional. It would have happened already. This admin has zero interest in a principled person like Johansen. And if you don’t see anything to “piss and moan” about in what’s happening, you need glasses.

Right. Dawn Johnsen’s too good for Obama. I can’t see why she’d want to work for him, either.