Senate confirmation of cabinet appointments: Congress-centered, presidency-centered, and nominee-centered explanations

Abstract

Recent presidents find greater proportions of their executive nominations encountering substantial opposition in the Senate. What accounts for failed nominations to senior-level executive positions? We address this question by examining 297 cabinet and other senior-level nominations between 1969 and 2012, testing multivariate models of the effects of the partisan and ideological composition of the Senate, the president's public approval and electoral mandate, and characteristics of the nominee. The analysis demonstrates that allegations of illegal or unethical behavior by the nominee and concerns over policy preferences best explain the Senate's response to executive nominations. It is clear that, unlike legislative outcomes, confirmation outcomes are the products of nominee-centered factors with presidency-centered factors and Congress-centered factors having little impact on Senate decisions.

Notes

1 Speaking on the nomination of Timothy F. Geithner to be secretary of the treasury; The Congressional Record, January 26, 2009, p. S805.

2 In addition to the departments formally carrying cabinet designations, several positions in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) are included: director of central intelligence; director of national intelligence (since 2005); director of the Office of Management and Budget (since 1974); special trade representative, ambassador to the United Nations; chair of the Council of Economic Advisors; director of the National Drug Control Policy (drug czar, since 1989); and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. EOP officials are selected because they are the key advisors to the president on both domestic and foreign policy. Chosen by the president, most regularly having access to him, and serving at his pleasure, they are closely identified with him and his policies (Hart, 1995; Warshaw, 1996). Not included are sub-cabinet officers and members of independent regulatory boards and commissions who have primarily administrative rather than advisory responsibilities, White House staff officials not subject to Senate confirmation, and acting and late-term appointments made by the president that were not considered by the Senate.

3 The Congressional Record, February 23, 1989, p. S1619. Later in the debate on Tower's nomination, Dole denied believing “the U.S. Senate is a rubber stamp for any President or any nominee” but added that “200 years of precedent dictate the presumption that the President should have his chosen Cabinet.” Responding to the notion of a presidential prerogative, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) stated: “We owe the President leeway but not obeisance.” See: The Congressional Record, March 9, 1989, p. S2456 and S2447, respectively.

4 The debate on Geithner's nomination is found in The Congressional Record, January 26, 2009, pp. S805–S820, with the quotations at S809 and S814, respectively.

5 Bell (2002) notes that interest groups are less active in seeking to influence cabinet confirmation decisions than judicial confirmation decisions.

6 Nominee-centered factors—concerns regarding the nominee's qualifications for the office, allegations of misconduct, and concerns regarding the nominee's or the administration's policy positions—were coded based on statements by senators appearing in The Congressional Record, appearing in reports of committee hearings, and contained in contemporary reports on nominations, such as those in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Rather than relying upon strict content-analysis procedures, the authors made judgments regarding senators’ expressed positions and the potential effects on nomination outcomes. For example, a senator's statement that he/she and the nomine disagreed on a policy issue was not coded as a policy objection, whereas a senator's statement that the nominee's position on a policy raised doubt about the nominee's fitness for the office was coded as a policy objection. Additionally, no effort was made to determine the severity of the offense for nominees accused of misconduct or to distinguish between types of offenses, as there are too few instances for meaningful analysis. A brief description of the objections associated with each nominee is presented in Appendix B.

7 Illustrating this is Senator Kent Conrad's (D-ND) explanation for his negative vote: “I believe [Bush's fiscal policy] is a profound mistake for this country and one that simply must be changed. To send a signal, I will cast my vote in opposition to the confirmation of Mr. Nussle.” Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) agreed that the confirmation of Nussle was more broadly about economic philosophy: “Let me note that the debate here is not about Congressman Nussle or his qualifications....[but] a debate of where the two parties stand on economic policies.” See: The Congressional Record, September 4, 2007, pp. S11019–11020.

8 Other research on Senate confirmation has included dummy variables indicating particular times within a presidency, such as whether the nomination was made in the first or second term (Routh, 2004) or during the first or fourth year of a term (Krutz et al., 1998). Similar variables were tested here but yielded no statistically significant effects. In the interest of parsimony, we do not include these temporal indicators in the analyses reported below.

9 The analysis was also conducted using a binary unified/divided government measure in lieu of the number of senators of the president's party. While the magnitude of some coefficients changed, there were no changes in the substantive interpretations of the results and the goodness-of-fit measures were weaker using the binary indicator. Thus, we prefer to employ the more precise ratio measure.

10 An alternative operationalization of ideological distance is the absolute value of the difference between the two parties’ mean DW-nominate scores, an approach reflecting Cox and McCubbins’ (2005) theory that congressional parties operate as opposing cartels and that greater distance between parties decreases support of cabinet nominations. The analysis reported in Table 3 was conducted using the cartel-theory measure of ideological distance but yielded no changes in the substantive conclusions of the analysis. More importantly, a measure of ideological distance related to the pivot point for breaking a filibuster reflects our perspective that cabinet nominations reflect conflict between the executive and the legislative branches rather than conflict between legislative parties.

11 Jones (2005) categorizes recent mandates as follows: mandates for change (1980); status quo mandates (1972, 1984, 1988, 1996); mixed or non-mandates (1968, 1976, 1992, 2000, 2004). We code the Ford presidency and the 2008 election as mixed mandates. Although a ray of sunshine after the agonizing last months of the Nixon presidency, a combination of factors suggest no mandate for Ford: he had not been elected as vice president; the Nixon pardon caused his approval ratings to tumble; and the Republican party was repudiated in the 1974 midterm elections. Despite the rhetoric of the 2008 campaign that emphasized “change,” Obama's vote margin was a modest seven percentage points and the dominate issue was an economic crisis that erupted after the parties’ nominating conventions rather than an overarching ideological principle (Mayhew, 2009).

12 Bolton's nomination failed when the vote on the cloture petition was rejected 56–42 (60 votes needed to proceed) on May 26, 2005; a second cloture vote on June 20, 2005, also was rejected, 54–38 (to avoid redundancy, only the first roll call vote is included). He was given a recess appointment by President Bush and later re-nominated for the position; that nomination was withdrawn when it became clear it would not be approved by the Senate. In the cases of Kempthorne and Johnson, the cloture petitions were agreed to (85–88 and 61–37, respectively) and the nominations subsequently confirmed on voice votes.

13 Values used in calculating these probabilities and vote percentages are Senators = 55, ideological distance = .713 (measure for the 112th Congress, the most recent available), and electoral mandate = −1 (mixed mandate, based on Obama being re-elected with a lower percentage of both the popular and electoral votes). Presidential approval was 52% at the time of the Kerry decision, 53% at the time of the Lew decision, and 51% at the time of the Hagel decision.

14 In an interview nearly two weeks before the vote, Senator John McCain stated the following: “There's a lot of ill will towards Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly. At one point, he said he was the worst president since Herbert Hoover, said the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War, which is nonsense. He was very ‘anti’ his own party, and people don’t forget that” (Rosenthal, 2013).

15 The Congressional Record, January 26, 2009, p. S815.

16 The Congressional Record, March 9, 1989, p. S2460.