President Obama apparently has no real drive to promote his agenda or get his appointees in office! He allows a minority of Senators to obstruct his judicial nominees (of the very few he has even made) and allows key positions to remain open in his administration.
All of this while never once mentioning the phrase "nuclear option" as the Republicans did when their agenda was delayed by having less than 60 votes.
Never once making a recess appointment to fill vacancies in his administration even after 1 year in office.
The following excerpt from a 1/20/2010 Jeffrey Toobin piece expresses my concern about judicial appointments.
Here is the full piece.
It’s an understatement to say that President Obama has had a busy agenda in his first year in office, so it may sound churlish to complain about something he hasn’t done. But to me the most surprising aspect of Obama’s first year has been his failure to take full advantage of one the great opportunities available to any President: the chance to nominate federal judges.
When Obama took office, there were more than a hundred vacancies on the federal appeals and district courts. One year into his tenure, Obama has made only thirty-one appointments to those courts, and just twelve have been confirmed. In George W. Bush’s first year, with a similar number of vacancies, he made sixty-four nominations. White House officials assert that ten new district court nominations are imminent, but the overall pace remains astonishingly slow. I wrote about this aspect of Obama’s Presidency last September, and the trend has continued....
Republicans have stalled on many nominations, fought others, and mostly done their best to slow down the pace. What’s perplexing is that Obama himself has not filled the pipeline with nominations; if he did, Republicans might feel some pressure to move the process along. Senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has held prompt hearings for all of Obama’s nominees, but he can’t hold hearings on nominations that haven’t yet been made.
Obama himself is currently going through a rough patch in his presidency, and his influence on Capitol Hill is waning. An assertive Republican minority will probably only feel emboldened to engage in ever more obstructionist tactics. A thin slate of judicial nominees only makes the Republicans’ task easier.
Can Obama really believe there would be a consequence to at least making recess appointments to fill vacancies in his administration?
Is he afraid to show the Republicans as hypocrites by threatening to use the very "nuclear option" on them that they invented?
Can anyone really name anything that Obama has really fought for and won since possibly the watered-down stimulus plan way back in February 2009?