Meanwhile, over in the Senate ...

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: February 25, 2009

While the chattering class was getting ready for President Obama’s big address last night, the U.S. Senate was conducting some important business that went all but unnoticed.

From Fox News:

California Rep. Hilda Solis won confirmation Tuesday as President Barack Obama’s labor secretary, giving the agency a decidedly pro-worker tilt after years of business-friendly leadership under the Bush administration.

The 80-17 vote ended more than a month of delays prompted by GOP concerns over Democrat Solis’ work for a pro-union organization, and later, revelations about her husband’s unpaid taxes.

“A decidedly pro-worker tilt”? That’s putting it lightly.

I have to admit that I thought this would be another Cabinet nomination that would end in failure. Solis is by no means a pragmatic, reach-across-the-aisle consensus builder, as the president is styling himself to be. Solis is a knock-the-doors-down labor advocate. They nearly cried at the news that she would be the Labor nominee. Business has no audience with her whatsoever; I thought that Republican leaders in the Senate would at least insist on a Labor leader who would apply an even-handed approach to Labor issues. Remember that pending card-check legislation—the so-called Employee Free Choice Act—that’s on the way.

There was a very real possibility that the GOP would filibuster Solis’s nomination. So how did she get 80 votes?

From a broader perspective, we are seeing a pattern with President Obama. He is nominating bipartisan pragmatists to posts that involve money and the military; consider Janet Napolitano at Homeland, Bob Gates at Defense and Ray LaHood at Transportation (and he tried for Judd Gregg at Commerce), but Solis’s nomination is a signal that he isn’t shying away from placing avowed liberals in the posts where social change can be made. Attorney General Eric Holder and Steven Chu at Energy are other examples. (Need proof? Read what this guy had to say about Chu’s selection.)

It’s just another reason (the first being the high and immediate bar he set last night to do health care reform this year) to anticipate Obama’s new nominee to head Health and Human Services. Tom Daschle wasn’t exactly known as a pragmatist. What will Obama signal to us with his replacement?