Last night, it seemed as though the Solis nomination would get put off until after recess. It looks like there will be a Solis vote today, a labor source emails me. (Of course, Congress being Congress delays are always possible.) This comes just in time as the Service Employees International Union along with Latino, environmental and other groups will drop more than 10,000 petitions at the committee’s door to advocate for Solis’s confirmation. Not surprisingly they have a video along with the petition that you can see here.
Have three thoughts on all of this:
1. Solis did not help herself at the confirmation. By being hesitant on the Employee Free Choice Act and otherwise slightly Palinesque, she didn’t do herself or the administration a favor. People who know Solis don’t have a good explanation for her performance. Usually, she’s nobody’s pushover but for whatever reason she seemed weak and that gave the Republicans an in.
2. Tax woes run amok. The law of Washington scandals is that they tend to spread out until they become unwieldy and absurd. Thus the Tom Daschle failure to pay taxes on limo rides became Solis’s problem when it was revealed her husband had a tax lien. At a certain point, the scandal gets defined in such a large way that everyone gets caught up in it. I can think of two other instances of this. The first was when Zoe Baird’s nomination to be attorney general was derailed in 1993 because of failure to pay taxes for domestic help. A second Clinton nominee, Kimba Wood, also fell for a problem with taxes on domestic help. Janet Reno, not one to use domestic help, was the third and final nominee. Eventually the collective DC zeitgeist declared the once insurmountable problem, to not be a problem as long as you paid up and a slew of nominees were confirmed.
In 1987, Douglas Ginsburg was nominated for the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan after Robert Bork’s nomination was rejected by the U.S. Senate. Ginsburg’s nomination had to be withdrawn after it was revealed that he’d smoked pot as a student and as a law professor at Harvard. (Hey, it was a different time.) In the days after Ginsburg’s withdrawal a slew of aspiring politicians including Al Gore, Bruce Babbitt, and others admitted their marijuana use and the once prohibitive crime of joints smoked as an adult was rendered, at most, a misdemeanor. Solis got caught up in a smaller version of that dynamic.
3. The fight over Solis is really just a precursor of the looming battle over the Employee Free Choice Act. A person with knowledge of the meeting earlier this week between AFL president John Sweeney and Vice President Joe Biden noted that they discussed EFCA and the administration’s continued commitment to it. When the battle is joined–probably in late Spring–Solis’s nomination will look like a skirmish.
Late Update: Solis’ nomination will get a committee vote at 5pm today. The timeline for consideration by the full Senate, however, remains unclear. –e.s.
