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While most executive nominees are successfully confirmed, this success masks wide variation in how long it takes the Senate to decide. Delay of critical nominees influences the character and effectiveness of agencies while hampering the policy ambitions of presidents. The exact logic of which nominees are targeted for delay and why, however, remains difficult to uncover. Building on prior literature, this project suggests that delay can be used to protect allied agencies from presidential politicization. Using a data set of several thousand executive nominations from 1987 to 2012, the ideological predisposition of an agency relative to the president is demonstrated to influence senatorial delay. Ultimately, these findings help explain why some nominees are delayed while other, seemingly similar, nominees are not.

While established in the Constitution as a means of filling key posts during long gaps between legislative sessions, recess appointments have recently become a common and essential tool for bypassing procedural hurdles in the Senate and maintaining adequate staffing in federal bureaucracies. Despite being ubiquitous in the past three decades, recess appointments may now be relegated to the status of constitutional relics. This development is due to the related trends of using pro forma congressional sessions to deny presidents an opportunity to issue recess appointments and the recent Senate precedent that all reduces the power of the filibuster on executive nominations. Now, depending on whether government is divided, presidents either cannot use or do not require recess appointments. This article explores the future prospects for recess appointments as well as the theoretical implications for the demise of this unilateral power.

Presidents routinely employ Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs) to inform Congress about the executive's thoughts and position on pending legislation. Such statements are used for a variety of purposes, including bill promotion, suggesting changes, issuing veto threats, and addressing perceived threats to traditional powers. While SAPs have been identified as an important vehicle for interbranch communication and a key source of insight into presidential preferences, many questions remain as to how presidents make use of SAPs' full range of potential. Using a novel data set of over 4,600 SAPs across multiple administrations, we explore the content of these interbranch communications to uncover how, when, and why presidents use such statements over time. Ultimately, we demonstrate the many ways that presidential use of SAPs is strategic based on political contexts.

ObjectivePresidents routinely employ public statements to inform Congress about their position on pending legislation. Position‐taking is strategic, with presidents choosing whether, how, how often, and when to intervene. We move beyond the traditional dichotomies of issuance and position to explore the timing and frequency of presidential position‐taking during the lawmaking process.MethodWe use Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs)–bill‐specific messages addressed to Congress–to analyze presidential communications. Our regression analyses examine both the frequency of SAPs usage on bills and when in the process presidents communicate their position.ResultsWe find that presidents take positions sparingly and most often at the early stages of the lawmaking process.ConclusionPresidential communications during the lawmaking process are more about winnowing options and bargaining over bill text than influencing pivotal votes.