The Trump White House’s message of the day for July 11 — at least until the the whole Donald Trump Jr. collusion thing blew up — was alleged obstruction of Trump nominees by Senate Democrats. And CNSNews.com, like the Trump stenographers they are, dutifully parroted that message.
Melanie Arter wrote:
Democrats in the Senate have launched an “unprecedented obstruction” campaign of President Donald Trump’s nominees, the White House said Monday.
Marc Short, director of Legislative Affairs, likened the Democrats’ behavior to children on the playground who take their toys and go home out of spite.
[…]There are a total of 133 nominees waiting for consideration by various committees, Short noted.
“To date, the Senate has confirmed a total of 50 Trump administration nominees. To put that in perspective, the Senate had confirmed 202 officials at this same point in the Obama administration. We think that that is a fair analogy, because Republicans now control the Senate. Democrats controlled the Senate at that point, and the comparison is 50 to 202,” Short said.
“By the August recess in 2009, the Senate had confirmed 292 Obama administration nominees by voice vote alone. To date, the Trump administration nominees have received five voice vote confirmations,” he said.
Short accused Democrats of “putting their agenda ahead of the will of the American people.”
Susan Jones followed with her own spin:
President Donald Trump’s first tweets on Tuesday dealt with Democrat obstructionism, the need for Republicans to repeal and replace Obamacare, and his effort to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles.
“The Senate Democrats have only confirmed 48 of 197 Presidential Nominees. They can’t win so all they do is slow things down & obstruct!” he wrote at 7 a.m.
On that same subject, President Donald Trump retweeted an item from “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday morning. The retweet quoted Mark Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, as blaming Sen. Chuck Schumer for “running an unprecedented campaign of obstruction aginst the President’s nominees for high-ranking posistions in government.”
Neither Jones nor Arter mentioned the fact that, as the Associated Press notes, the Senate is controlled by Republicans, which means they control the floor schedule of when nominees are consider. They are also silent on the fact that that one significant factor in the lack of Senate approval of Trump’s nominees is that Trump has submitted so few of them. As Politico pointed out, of the 564 executive branch jobs that require preisdential nominations, Trump hasn’t nominated anyone for 384 of them.
By contrast to Jones’ and Arter’s slavish fealty to the White House line, a July 12 CNS article by Zenny Phuong shockingly (for CNS) tells both sides of the story, conceding that Senate Republicans obstructed President Obama’s nominees. Phuong didn’t, however, didn’t ask the conservatives she quoted in her article — Judicial Crisis Network’s Carrie Severino and the Heritage Foundation’s Ed Feulner — about their respective flip-flops on obstruction of presidential nominees.