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 Those are the two Obama appointees to the NLRB who are now going to be withdrawn and will not even get a Senate vote.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.
Richard Cordray’s nomination seems set to sail through the Senate now. Voting is underway on cloture, which is where we’ll see if Cordray can overcome the filibuster that has already derailed his nomination once and has delayed his confirmation for years and denied a permanent director for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since its creation. So far, he’s on track to easily beat the filibuster, as per the deal struck to break the GOP-created logjam.
Sahil Kapur has the rundown on the deal Harry Reid has struck to avoid a showdown over the filibuster rules of the Senate.
Harry Reid was just on the Senate floor and credited John McCain with helping to arrange a deal on the pending presidential nominations that have had Senate Democrats on the verge of changing the filibuster rules. Not clear what the parameters of that deal are yet.
The key line from Reid: “It is a compromise. I think we get what we want, they get what they want.”
The first of the votes on the seven pending nominations at issue is scheduled for 11 a.m. ET, so we should know more soon.
Zimmerman juror decides not to write book after all because it was too soon, gross and unseemly.
Hours-long Senate meeting adjourns with no deal on nominations or filibuster rules. Sahil Kapur was there as the meeting broke up. Here’s what senators had to say.
We mentioned earlier today that one of the jurors on the Zimmerman jury has already signed on with a literary agent to sell her book about being a juror on the trial – in other words less than 36 hours after the end of case. Presumably – hopefully – she wasn’t in contact with the agent prior to the verdict. But that turnaround leaves little question that she was planning on writing a book at least during the time she was deliberating. Read More
As of 6:40 p.m. ET:
~ Senators are currently in a rare, closed-door, all-senators meeting in the Old Senate Chamber to try to hammer out an agreement that gets nominees to the CPRB and NLRB through the Senate and avoids changing the filibuster rules.
~ Sens. Reid and McConnell met a short time ago, before the all-senator meeting. No clear picture on whether they made any headway on a deal.
~ White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was reportedly in the meeting with Reid and McConnell, but the White House tells TPM that McDonough was not there for the meeting, that the White House is not negotiating with senators, and that this is all in Reid’s hands.
Sahil Kapur has more from the Hill.