There’s been much bleating and whining these days about how Senate Republicans are refusing to confirm President Obama’s nominees. But lost in all this is how the completely dysfunctional Senate is holding up Republican nominees as well.
Take, for example, outgoing Federal Labor Relations Authority member and former chairman Thomas M. Beck , who was nominated by Obama a while ago to be the Republican on the three-member National Mediation Board.
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By law, most of these alphabet boards — the NLRB, the FTC, the NTSB and so on — must, in effect, have members from both parties, with the White House getting to pick the tie-breaking member.
To help move these things along, nominees are generally moved in pairs — one R and one D — to make the vote more palatable for each side.
Even so, Beck is used to waiting for the Senate to act. It took him 462 days to be confirmed in 2008 for his current job, when a nasty fight between President George W. Bush and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid stalled him until the waning days of the administration. He was in the last batch of confirmees in that year.
This time, Beck had to wait eight months until “his” Democratic counterpart was nominated. Problem was, his Democrat was the current chairman of the NMB, Harry R. Hoglander, who was being tapped for a second term.
Hoglander had infuriated Republicans (and especially Delta Air Lines) when the board changed the rules on how labor-election votes are counted to make it easier for unions to organize.
So Hoglander stalled. And, therefore, so did Beck, whose tenure at the FLRA is over at the end of this year. Beck had been kept in limbo for a total of 589 days — likely a modern indoor record — when he asked Obama last week to withdraw the nomination. He’s now looking to work in private-sector health care at the end of the year.
Some guys have no patience.
Catching Up With . . .
Today’s installment of the regular Loop feature on newsmakers of yore stars former congressman Vito Fossella.
When last we saw him, back in May 2008, the New York Republican was on the House floor announcing that he would not run for another term.
The announcement followed a bizarre late-night drunken-driving arrest in Alexandria — after which we learned he had fathered a 3-year-old girl with a woman not his wife. His political career was over, the pundits said.
Not so fast.
We called the other day to see how he’s doing. The former five-term lawmaker from Staten Island, we’re happy to report, says he’s doing very well, thank you.
He’s a managing director at huge Loop Fan and former senator Alfonse M. D’Amato’s Park Strategies lobby shop in Manhattan. (It’s said to be one of the fastest-growing lobby outfits in the state.)
And he even remains so popular with fellow Islanders that the Staten Island Advance recently talked about Fossella jumping into the race — the primary is in June — for his old seat should the incumbent, Rep. Michael Grimm (R), falter as a result of allegations of illegal campaign contributions.
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