Obstructionism

from today's NY Times:

"A leading Republican predicted Sunday that President Obama's appointment of 15 officials while sidestepping Senate confirmation would make it more difficult to get bipartisan support for future legislation."

He, Lindsay Graham, is joking right? 'Bipartisan support...' That's comedy, right?

A priority for the Senate has to be fixing its rules. Executive branch appointments have piled up to a ridiculous degree, to the point where critical departments such as Treasury lack the management capacity to do their jobs. Some of the blame has to go to the Obama administration itself; they've been unusually slow in naming appointments, possibly to do with their unusually stringent vetting process. But despite how slow Obama has been in naming executive branch appointments, approvals have still piled up in the Senate thanks entirely to Republican obstructionism. The GOP has used every arcane trick in the Senate rule book to block approvals. We can huff and puff and scream at these spoilsport losers, but the only real answer is to change the rules to make such monkey-wrenching impossible.