Senate Confirmation Bias

You never can tell about Senate confirmation.

There could scarcely have been a more qualified candidate to serve as secretary of commerce than Adm. Lewis Strauss (pronounced "strawz"), who had been chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, among many things in a long and distinguished career in business and public life. President Eisenhower had wanted Strauss to succeed John Foster Dulles as secretary of state; but Strauss didn't want to preempt the appointment of his friend, Under Secretary Christian Herter. Yet when Ike appointed Strauss to the Commerce Department (1958-59), the Democrats, who had just added an historic 16 seats to their control of the Senate, were out for blood. They didn't like the fact that Strauss, as AEC chairman, had presided over the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance, and they wanted to humiliate Eisenhower. So Strauss was rejected.

Things are likely to go a little more smoothly for Donald Trump's appointees, this week and next. The left is determined to have a fight—the New York Times seems especially agitated about Attorney General-designate Jefferson Sessions—and committee hearings will be especially contentious. But Republicans control the Senate and show no signs of breaking ranks over Sessions, or anyone else. No one, at this juncture, can say who will have the most difficulty getting confirmed; more important, nobody can now say who, in the long run, will have been worth the trouble.

For the drama of Senate confirmation often yields to the law of unintended consequences. I call it the Hickel Paradox; and its corollary, the O'Neill Rule.

When the newly-elected Richard Nixon nominated his cabinet in 1968, the appointee most reviled by the press, and by some distance, was Gov. Walter Hickel of Alaska, who was to be secretary of the Interior. Hickel had been a successful property developer, and the nascent environmental lobby joined forces with the muckraking columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, and Senate Democrats, to depict Hickel as a corrupt governor and sworn enemy of wilderness, wildlife, and common decency. Of course, none of it was true—Pearson/Anderson were notoriously reckless, and the Times, as usual, was apoplectic—but Hickel's nomination was almost fatally delayed, and he barely made it in by Nixon's inaugural.