[UPDATE: I think I was mistaken in the post below; see here for my explanation.]
It looks like the Administration’s decision to appoint some controversial judges via recess appointments has led to a political victory on other appointments:
Democrats will allow votes on 25 noncontroversial appointments to the district and appeals courts that they’ve been holding up for months. In exchange, Bush agreed not to invoke his constitutional power to make recess appointments while Congress is away, as he has done twice in recent months with judicial nominees.
The deal lasts until a second Bush presidency begins or a new president takes office, officials said. The agreement was struck days before the Senate began its Memorial Day recess, in a meeting among top Senate Democrats and Republicans as well as Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff.
So recess appointments seem to have been an effective bargaining chip. (I set aside the debates about whether such appointments are constitutionally sound, a matter on which I have no informed opinion; I speak here just of the politics.)
Naturally, if Bush loses enough votes in the election as a result, then it won’t be much of a net victory after all, but I rather doubt that this would happen. It’s also possible that Bush’s actions lost him goodwill with some Senators, and thus made various other things harder for him; I don’t know enough to be able to speak to that. (The article gives a bit more of the political picture — do read the whole thing if you’re interested in the subject.)
But at first glance, it looks like the recess appointments gambit has paid off, and has helped Bush get confirmed some nominees who might otherwise have remained bottled up.
UPDATE: A reader suggests that perhaps the 25 noncontroversial appointees would have gotten through in any event were it not for the recess appointments. I’m skeptical about that, partly because I think — given the past delays even on the relatively noncontroversial appointees, and given the temptation to block all nominations during an election year — that the Democrats would likely have blocked many of the 25 in any event. But I might well be mistaken. The reader writes:
You’ll probably want to confirm with someone who’s far more up on the ins and outs than I, but I think that it was hardly the recess appointments that were an “effective bargaining chip.” The recess appointments were a response to the Democratic filibusters of the half-dozen or so controversial nominees (Brown, Kuhl, Haynes, Pickering and Pryor themselves, etc.). Those folks still will not get a vote. In response to the aggressive use of the recess-appointment power, the Dems held up dozens of noncontroversial appointees who otherwise would have been easily confirmed. They did so because if Congress begins to permit the President to call a ten-day adjournment a “recess,” the advice and consent power is seriously threatened. In response to this Democratic “hardball,” the Administration cried “uncle” on the recess appointees, and the Dems therefore agreed, as the story you quote indicates, to “allow votes on 25 noncontroversial appointments.” The President is no better off, in other words, than he was before he appointed Pickering and Pryor (except, of course, that he has both of them on the bench temporarily).
Certainly possible; hard for me to tell for sure (hence my tentativeness on this throughout).
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