Anthony J. Madonna

Adding Recess Appointments to the President’s “Tool Chest” of Unilateral Powers

In the struggle to control the federal bureaucracy, presidents have an overlooked but powerful tool: the recess appointment. By making recess appointments, presidents can fill vacancies without the advice and consent of the Senate. The authors delineate three conditions that define presidential unilateral powers and demonstrate how recess appointments fit within that paradigm. Presidents, the authors argue, should be more likely to make recess appointments to important policy-making positions, namely, major independent agencies. The authors compile a data set of every civilian nomination and recess appointment between 1987 and 2004. After controlling for other factors, the authors find strong support for their theory.

Going Nuclear, Senate Style

Conflict within and beyond the United States Senate has refocused scholarly and public attention on “advice and consent,” the constitutional provision that governs the Senates role in confirming presidential appointments. Despite intense and salient partisan and ideological disputes about the rules of the game that govern the Senate confirmation process for judicial appointees, reformers have had little success in limiting the ability of a minority to block contentious nominees. In this paper, we explore the Senates brush with the so-called “nuclear option” that would eliminate filibusters of judicial nominees, and evaluate competing accounts of why the Senate appears to be so impervious to significant institutional reform. The past and present politics of the nuclear option, we conclude, have broad implications for how we construct theories of institutional change. Sarah A. Binder is Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution (sbinder@brookings.edu). Anthony Madonna is a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University (ajmadonn@wustl.edu). Steven S. Smith is the Kate M. Gregg Professor of Social Sciences, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Weidenbaum Center, Washington University (smith@wustl.edu). The authors thank Stanley Bach, Richard Baker, Greg Koger, Forrest Maltzman, Elizabeth Rybicki, Eric Schickler, and Greg Wawro for helpful comments and advice.

Assessing Congressional Responses to Growing Presidential Powers: The Case of Recess Appointments

In 2007, the U.S. Senate moved into permanent session to stop President George W. Bush from making recess appointments. This article examines this episode. We argue that Congress is only able to effectively check presidential unilateral powers when the president’s use of such powers creates high political costs for a sufficient number of members such that congressional collective action is possible. Using case studies and multivariate analysis, we show that Bush used recess appointments far more than his predecessors, creating high political costs for Senate Democrats and driving them to find an innovative way to check the power of the president.

Coalition Formation in the House and Senate: Examining the Effect of Institutional Change on Major Legislation

We investigate various theories of legislative coalition formation in a bicameral context. More specifically, we employ a quasi-experimental design to examine the size of coalitions in both the House and Senate across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This offers us considerable analytical leverage in investigating how changes in key institutional decision rules (the adoption of the Reed’s Rules in the House and the passage of cloture in the Senate) affect the likelihood of passing major policy reform. Our findings indicate that when the size of the majority party is adequately controlled for, changes in institutional structures do not have a significant effect on cross-chamber coalition formation.

Procedural Signaling, Party Loyalty, and Traceability in the U.S. House of Representatives:

In this article, we take advantage of a new source of data providing updates from the Majority Leader’s Office that signal the leadership’s positions on floor votes. We offer a more nuanced explanation of voting in the U.S. House as our findings suggest that not all procedural votes are created equal. While the most liberal members of the party vote with the leadership on procedural votes at high rates and nearly 100 percent of the time when signaled by the majority leader, moderate members are significantly less likely to support the party and are not responsive to these signals.

Confirmation Wars, Legislative Time, and Collateral Damage: The Impact of Supreme Court Nominations on Presidential Success in the U.S. Senate

Presidents often see a Supreme Court nomination as an opportunity to leave a lasting mark on policy. Recent studies speculate that focusing on Supreme Court nominees affects presidential success beyond the confirmation process, but this has not been established systematically. We develop and test a hypothesis stating that presidents who get into a battle to promote a controversial Supreme Court nominee will see delays and failures in their efforts to promote their legislative agenda in the Senate and fill lower level judicial vacancies. We test our theory using data on presidential policy agenda items from 1967 to 2010 and lower level judicial nominations from 1977 to 2010. We find that increased efforts in promoting confirmation reduce the likelihood of timely Senate approval of important policy proposals and nominees to federal district courts.

Partisan brand name building and deficit politics: examining the role of power sharing on party issue consistency

Scholars of political parties frequently note that a party’s candidates are aided by the presence of a consistent and favorable party brand name. We argue that partisan success in maintaining a consistent position on important policy issues hinges on how their role in the government motivates their strategies about public policy formation. Specifically, when parties share control of government institutions, parties need to balance their electoral interest in promoting a consistent brand name with the need to generate public policy that leads to effective governance. When control is held by one party, the costs and benefits of effective governance are born entirely by the majority, absolving both parties of the need to compromise on the substance of policy. By employing item response theory methods to assess patterns of party voting on deficit issues, we find strong support for these hypotheses.

Obstructing Agenda-Setting: Examining Blue Slip Behavior in the Senate

Senators increasingly use obstructive tactics to stall or kill legislation. Unfortunately, because senators can obstruct privately, scholars have little understanding of the conditions under which they do so. Using previously unreleased data from 2001-2009, we examine Senate obstruction by focusing on blue slipping behavior. We find that extreme members who do not belong to the presidents party are most likely to employ negative blue slips. Thus, as moderate senators continue to be replaced by more extreme members, senators will increasingly use obstructive tactics.

Nuclear Fallout: Investigating the Effect of Senate Procedural Reform on Judicial Nominations

Abstract On November 21, 2013, U.S. Senate Democrats utilized the long threatened “nuclear option,” thereby allowing a simple-majority of the chamber to end debate on lower federal court judicial nominations. Formal theory predicts that this change should permit the president to nominate more ideologically extreme nominees. By comparing President Obama’s nominees before and after the Senate’s change to the confirmation process, we are able to provide the first comprehensive examination of how the nuclear option is likely to impact the ideological makeup of the lower federal courts. We additionally examine the impact of the nuclear option on time to confirmation and nominee success. Our results indicate, while post-nuclear option nominees are not significantly more liberal, they are being confirmed more often and more quickly, allowing Obama and Senate Democrats to more efficiently fill the federal judiciary with Democratic-leaning judges.

No vacancy: holdover capacity and the continued staffing of major commissions

Although the United States (US) federal bureaucracy is plagued by high vacancy rates generally, quorum requirements and small board sizes make vacancies particularly problematic within major independent regulatory commissions. Not all vacancies, however, are created equal. By statute, some major boards allow members to continue serving beyond their original term in the absence of a confirmed replacement. The difference between an empty seat and a holdover official is important as it can determine whether a board is functional or inoperable. In this article, we examine how the presence of holdover provisions within such commissions alters confirmation dynamics and vacancy rates. Evidence suggests that holdover provisions lead to quicker confirmation on nominations as well as fewer complete vacancies. Such structures thus help mitigate the short-term problems stemming from staffing independent regulatory boards, especially given the tendency towards obstruction in the US Senate.