Obama Aides To Labor: Chill Out On Solis
As I noted the other day, some labor operatives have been growing worried and restive about the Obama administration’s refusal to signal to them whether they should start publicly hammering GOPers in the Senate over their efforts to slow the nomination of Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary.
Well, it turns out that Obama aides have now given the unions their marching orders: Chill out and stay quiet, because they’re not worried about her confirmation.
A senior official at a major union tells me that the unions privately asked Obama aides if labor should go public and start hammering the Republicans in an effort to get Solis moving. Obama aides told them there was no need, the official says.
“We asked the Obama people, `Would it make sense for us to be more public in pressing Congress to move on this quickly?’” the official tells me. “They said they weren’t worried at this point, so, No.”
The official says the Obama people didn’t specify when they’d start pressing themselves for Solis’ confirmation. The most likely explanation is that the Obama team wants to get the political heavy lifting on the stimulus package out of the way before turning its attention to pushing Republican Senators to get moving on Solis.
Anyway, so that’s the deal here.
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jesus. sorry about that, fixing now.
it’s:
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com
Just came back in and saw this. Thanks for the update on that!
This would not be so upsetting to one of us here out in the hinterlands, who is not familiar with how government works, and doesnt like seeing former Bush appointee running labor. It would seem to us that Obama could at least start “backfilling” the open positions in Labor which do not require Senate confirmation.