Today’s Sacrificial Lambs

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The odd ones out in today’s Senate deal are Sharon Block and Richard Griffin. Those are the two Obama appointees to the NLRB who are now going to be withdrawn and will not even get a Senate vote. They will be replaced by new nominees who are guaranteed, under the terms of the deal between Senate Democrats and Republicans, to win confirmation before the end of the summer.

Block and Griffin, who were recess-appointed to the NLRB by Obama previously, are left on the outside looking in, after a long battle to win confirmation. Obama pulls the plug on their nominations and they go home.

Cordray was also recess-appointed, so it’s not clear why he gets to proceed and the two NLRB nominees do not. The idea is that they were somehow tainted by the recess appointments (and the subsequent court decision that charted new ground in declaring their recess appointments unconstitutional, along with most of the recess appointment ever made). But so was Cordray. Compromises, though, often abide only by their own logic.

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