What can you find out about the other recess appointments made today?

[w8liftinglady]

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060104-3.html

Home > News & Policies





For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
January 4, 2006

Personnel Announcement




President George W. Bush today recess appointed the following individuals:

Floyd Hall, of New Jersey, to be a Member of the AMTRAK Reform Board.

Enrique J. Sosa, of Florida, to be a Member of the AMTRAK Reform Board.

Nadine Hogan, of Florida, to be a Member of the Board of Directors of the Inter-American Foundation (Private Representative).

Roger W. Wallace, of Texas, to be a Member of the Board of Directors of the Inter-American Foundation (Private Representative).

Gordon England, of Texas, to be Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Benjamin A. Powell, of Florida, to be General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Ronald E. Meisburg, of Virginia, to be General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board.

Julie L. Myers, of Kansas, to be Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security (Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

Tracy A. Henke, of Missouri, to be Executive Director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness at the Department of Homeland Security.

Arthur F. Rosenfeld, of Virginia, to be Federal Mediation and Conciliation Director at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.

Ellen R. Sauerbrey, of Maryland, to be Assistant Secretary of State (Population, Refugees, and Migration).

Dorrance Smith, of Virginia, to be Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs).

Robert D. Lenhard, of Maryland, to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission.

Steven T. Walther, of Nevada, to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission.

Hans Von Spakovsky, of Georgia, to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission.

Peter N. Kirsanow, of Ohio, to be a Member of the National Labor Relations Board.

Stephen Goldsmith, of Indiana, to be a Member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

[annabanana]

1. good question

I hope these will get special scrutiny:

Robert D. Lenhard, of Maryland, to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission.
Steven T. Walther, of Nevada, to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission.
Hans Von Spakovsky, of Georgia, to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission.

recess appointments give me the willies..

nom.

[w8liftinglady]

2. They scare me,too...kick

[quaoar]

3. The two Amtrak appointments

are re-appointments. Bush nominated them earlier but the Senate never acted on them. Up their terms were up at the end of this year. Supposedly Amtrak's board couldn't conduct business if it lost two directors.

[DBoon]

4. something about Lenhard

Robert D. Lenhard, of Maryland, was nominated (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051216-12.html) December 16, 2005, by President George W. Bush to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission for a term expiring April 30, 2011. Lenhard replaces Danny Lee McDonald, whose term has expired.

"Mr. Lenhard currently serves as Associate General Counsel for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO. He previously served as an Associate with Kirschner, Weinberg & Dempsey. Earlier in his career, Mr. Lenhard worked for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, AFL-CIO. He received his bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University and his JD from the University of California, Los Angeles." <1> (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051216-4.html)

Lenhard "was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law." <2> (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/16/AR2005121601717_pf.html)

"As a lawyer, Lenhard wasn't able to overturn McCain-Feingold before it took effect, but, as an FEC commissioner, he'll be able to do the next best thing and try to gut it," Arianna Huffington wrote (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/heck-of-a-job-viveca_b_12504.html) December 18, 2005. "But that's not why I'm obsessing (if I got worked up every time Bush picked a fox to guard a government henhouse, I'd never get anything done!). No, the thing that has my mental wheels in overdrive is the fact that Lenhard is the husband of Viveca Novak -- the Time Magazine journalist whose loose lips may end up saving Karl Rove from joining Scooter Libby on Indictment Row."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Robert_D._Lenhard

[phoebe]

7. beat me to it!!

[wakeme2008]

5. check them out here

In the case of Sosa and one other, they have been recessed appointed before.

http://www.sourcewatch.org

[phoebe]

6. Robert D. Lenhard - opposes campaign finance, wife is Viveca Novak

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Robert_D._Lenhard
gives us this info.

Robert D. Lenhard, of Maryland, was nominated (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051216-12.html) December 16, 2005, by President George W. Bush to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission for a term expiring April 30, 2011. Lenhard replaces Danny Lee McDonald, whose term has expired.

"Mr. Lenhard currently serves as Associate General Counsel for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO. He previously served as an Associate with Kirschner, Weinberg & Dempsey. Earlier in his career, Mr. Lenhard worked for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, AFL-CIO. He received his bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University and his JD from the University of California, Los Angeles." <1> (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051216-4.html)

Lenhard "was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law." <2> (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/16/AR2005121601717_pf.html)

"As a lawyer, Lenhard wasn't able to overturn McCain-Feingold before it took effect, but, as an FEC commissioner, he'll be able to do the next best thing and try to gut it," Arianna Huffington wrote (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/heck-of-a-job-viveca_b_12504.html) December 18, 2005. "But that's not why I'm obsessing (if I got worked up every time Bush picked a fox to guard a government henhouse, I'd never get anything done!). No, the thing that has my mental wheels in overdrive is the fact that Lenhard is the husband of Viveca Novak -- the Time Magazine journalist whose loose lips may end up saving Karl Rove from joining Scooter Libby on Indictment Row."

On Viveca...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viveca_Novak

On December 2, 2005, The New York Times reported that Novak tipped off Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, about the testimony that one of her colleages at Time Magazine, Matthew Cooper, was giving to the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. The tip off may have caused Rove to change his testimony.

[w8liftinglady]

8. Sauerbrey-Pro-life

http://www.genderhealth.org/sauerbrey.php

Concerned Women Call for Defeat of Sauerbrey Nomination


The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is considering President Bush's nomination of Ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey to be the Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. Ambassador Sauerbrey is utterly unqualified for this critical position. Unlike her well-qualified predecessors, she has no experience with refugee protection or responding to complex humanitarian emergencies, or in managing a $700+ budget. In her present position at the UN, Sauerbrey has repeatedly sought to undermine and politicize reproductive health services -- unacceptable for the 80% of refugees who are women and children. We don't need an ideologue in this position. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee must reject Ambassador Sauerbrey and request that the President nominate someone with the experience and expertise necessary to fulfill such a vital role in the State Department.

[CatholicEdHead]

9. Are recess appointments like this a common pratice?

I assume the Clinton admistration also did some, but not as many as this. Does anybody have stats on this?

It should go through Congress no matter what.

[w8liftinglady]

10. Traci Henke-deleted data about racial profiling

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,178208,00.html

WASHINGTON — A Democratic senator raised concerns Thursday about a Homeland Security Department nominee who deleted statistics about racial disparities in traffic stops from a draft press release.

[phoebe]

11. Steven T. Walther

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/news/topstories.html

snip

Steven T. Walther ’68 Nominated to Federal Election Commission

President George W. Bush announced in late December his intention to nominate Steven T. Walter '68 to be a member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for the remainder of a six-year term expiring April 2009. Walther is a partner at Walther, Key, Maupin, Oats, Cox & LeGoy, a firm he co-founded in 1972. He was recommended for the position by Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who said in a statement, "In addition to building a successful law practice in Nevada, Mr. Walther has been a leader not only on the ABA’s Board of Governors, but has been an active member on a number of its committees."

Walther also serves on the National Council of Human Rights First, the American Law Institute, and the Nevada State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, along with a number of other civic and conservation organizations. He recently served as president of the Boalt Hall Alumni Association.

[w8liftinglady]

12. Kirsanow said americans may clamor for arab internment camps

A team of veteran Asian Pacific American civil rights lawyers has joined at least two other civil rights groups nationwide in calling for the removal of a U.S. civil rights commissioner over comments he made about Arab Americans and detention camps.

In a letter to President George W. Bush on July 25, the team of eight lawyers — who argued successfully to overturn the landmark legal case Korematsu v. the United States in 1983 — demanded the removal of Commissioner Peter N. Kirsanow, a Cleveland attorney who said last month that if another terrorist attack by Arabs were to occur on U.S. soil, the American public would clamor for internment camps similar to those that detained Japanese Americans during World War II.

“I think we will have a return to Korematsu,” Kirsanow said at a July 19 commission hearing in Detroit, referring to the overturned 1944 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the government’s use of internment camps.

http://www.asianweek.com/2002_08_09/news_korematsu.html

[w8liftinglady]

13. also a lot of debate when he was appointed to another position

http://www.practicalradical.com/lwf/cr.html

snip

The Bush White House has replaced commissioner Victoria Wilson with the conservative Peter Kirsanow, even though Wilson's term has not ended. Wilson was appointed in Jan. of 2000 to replace Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., who died in 1998. According to federal law, new commissioners serve a term of six years, but the Bushies are pointing to wording in Clinton administration paperwork which states that Wilson's term would end when Higginbotham's would have ended (11-29-01). Mary Frances Berry refused to swear in Kirsanow, who was subsequently sworn in by a D.C. lawyer with Bush lawyer Alberto Gonzales looking on; when Kirsanow showed up for his first meeting on Friday, Dec. 7, he was ignored.
Berry has stated that she feels the courts ought to step in and resolve the matter, but Ashcroft's Justice Department sent a letter to the Commission stating that Berry had to have Ashcroft's permission before retaining legal aid.
See:

[phoebe]

14. Hans A. von Spakovsky - suppressor of voters, felon voting rolls in FL

general well-rounded asshat..

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/040920fa_fact

One of the more controversial parts of the new law requires, in most circumstances, voters who have registered by mail to provide their driver’s license or Social Security numbers, and to produce an official photo I.D. at the polls, or a utility bill. Hans A. von Spakovsky, a counsel to Acosta and the main Justice Department interpreter of HAVA, wrote to Judith A. Armold, an assistant attorney general in Maryland, that the Justice Department believed states must “verify” the Social Security numbers that people submit on their registration forms. For most states, this requirement won’t apply until 2006, but it may be a major hurdle for both the states and newly registered voters. “What D.O.J. is saying is clearly contrary to the statute in our view,” Armold says.

Von Spakovsky, a longtime activist in the voting-integrity cause, has emerged as the Administration’s chief operative on voting rights. Before going to Washington, he was a lawyer in private practice and a Republican appointee to the Fulton County Registration and Election Board, which runs elections in Atlanta. He belonged to the Federalist Society, a prominent organization of conservative lawyers, and had also joined the board of advisers of a lesser-known group called the Voting Integrity Project.

The V.I.P. was founded by Deborah Phillips, a former county official of the Virginia Republican Party, as an organization devoted principally to fighting voting fraud and promoting voter education. In 1997, von Spakovsky wrote an article for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research group, that called for an aggressive campaign to “purge” the election rolls of felons. Within months of that article’s publication, the V.I.P. helped put von Spakovsky’s idea into action. Phillips met with the company that designed the process for the removal of alleged felons from the voting rolls in Florida, a process that led, notoriously, to the mistaken disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, most of them Democratic, before the 2000 election. (This year, Florida again tried to purge its voting rolls of felons, but the method was found to be so riddled with errors that it had to be abandoned.) During the thirty-six-day recount in Florida, von Spakovsky worked there as a volunteer for the Bush campaign. After the Inauguration, he was hired as an attorney in the Voting Section and was soon promoted to be counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, in what is known as the “front office” of the Civil Rights Division. In that position, von Spakovsky, who is forty-five years old, has become an important voice in the Voting Section. (Von Spakovsky, citing Justice Department policy, has also declined repeated requests to be interviewed.)

In a recent speech at Georgetown University, von Spakovsky suggested that voting integrity will remain a focus for the Justice Department, and that voter access might best be left to volunteers. “Frankly, the best thing that can happen is when both parties and candidates have observers in every single polling place, wherever the votes are collected and tabulated, because that helps make sure that nothing happens that shouldn’t happen, that the votes are counted properly, and that there is transparency to maintain public confidence in elections,” he said. “Not enough people volunteer to be poll-watchers. They ought to do that so that there are poll-watchers everywhere in the country throughout the whole election process.” The Bush-Cheney campaign has announced plans to place lawyers on call for as many as thirty thousand precincts on Election Day, to monitor for vote fraud. Democratic lawyers also plan to be out in force.

[w8liftinglady]

15. Gordon England-another unqualified appointment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_England

Has NO military experience...none.

[w8liftinglady]

16. Spakovsky..."voting integrity"?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/16/AR2005121601717_pf.html

Career Justice Department lawyers involved in a Georgia case said von Spakovsky pushed strongly for approval of a state program requiring voters to have photo identification. A team of staff lawyers that examined the case recommended 4 to 1 that the Georgia plan should be rejected because it would harm black voters; the recommendation was overruled by von Spakovsky and other senior officials in the Civil Rights Division.

Before working in the Justice Department, von Spakovsky was the Republican Party chairman in Fulton County, Ga., and served on the board of the Voter Integrity Project, which advocated regular purging of voter roles to prevent felons from casting ballots.

[phoebe]

17. Stephen Goldsmith - "compassionate conservatism"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/goldsmith060599.htm

snip

Goldsmith's philosophy meshes with Bush's vision of "compassionate conservatism," which seeks to take the harsh edge off conservative ideology without straying from basic tenets of smaller government and personal responsibility

snip

Bush already has been criticized for his vague responses to questions about world and national issues, including Kosovo and abortion, and in Goldsmith, he has found someone who can help him develop an agenda that so far has been long on rhetoric and short on specifics.

snip

He is best known nationally for his efforts to privatize dozens of government agencies and functions, including street sweeping, airport operation, trash collection and wastewater treatment. According to his office, the city has saved nearly $400 million, cut taxes three times and decreased the overall city budget from $450 million to $441 million between 1992 and this year.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) called Goldsmith "the most innovative and creative leader in the country," Governing magazine named him public official of the year, and Time featured him in an article titled "Rising Republicans."

Altogether another delightful rethuglican..just what we've been programmed to expect..