Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of obstruction, I will fear no republican…

And maybe add one or two.

Senator Claire McCaskill via Twitter on her progress to abolish secret holds on nominations before the Senate:

More progress.We have every D Senator except Sen Byrd on the letter to end secret holds. 58 strong. Now we need to work on Rs. None so far.     about 1 hour ago  via UberTwitter  

Can it be? A crack in the obstruction?

Woohooo!!! First Republican signed the letter to never use a secret hold and abolish them. Big props to Sen Collins.     10 minutes ago  via UberTwitter  

But wait, where’s President Snowe?

Previously:

Senator Claire McCaskill (D): on secret holds via Twitter (May 4, 2010)

Speaking of Harry Truman, it’s Senator Claire McCaskill (D)… (May 1, 2010)

Senator Claire McCaskill (D): even more on secret holds (April 22, 2010)

Round one: McCaskill vs. secret holds (April 20, 2010)

Senator Claire McCaskill via Twitter on her progress to date in getting her Senate colleagues to address secret holds on nominations:

Now have 43 Senators on the letter pledging to never secretly hold a nomination and calling for the end of this very bad habit.     about 2 hours ago  via UberTwitter  

….This is a permanent pledge. No secret holds now or ever. Working to abolish forever.     about 1 hour ago  via UberTwitter  in reply to ….

It’d certainly be ironic if any of those 43 who signed the letter was responsible for any of the current secret holds.

Previously:

Speaking of Harry Truman, it’s Senator Claire McCaskill (D)… (May 1, 2010)

Senator Claire McCaskill (D): even more on secret holds (April 22, 2010)

Round one: McCaskill vs. secret holds (April 20, 2010)

Update:

From Senator Claire McCaskill via Twitter (May 5th):

Now have 50 signatures on End the Secret Hold letter.More work on it today.Rules being broken by failure of Rs to reveal who’s holding noms. 15 minutes ago via web

Round one: McCaskill vs. secret holds (April 20, 2010)

Secret holds redux (April 21, 2010)

Senator Claire McCaskill (D) speaking today in the Senate on secret holds:

The transcript:

Senator Claire McCaskill (D): Mr. President, I came to the floor on Tuesday of this week to, um, do something that I don’t think had been done before under the rules. We had a new law that went into effect, uh, in the early part of two thousand and seven that gave us a mechanism that was supposed to stop secret holds. Uh, and we are all waiting to see if, if by moving all of the nominations by unanimous consent if in fact the owners of the secret holds step forward. While we wait to see if the rule that was designed and passed into law works a bunch of us have been talking. And the, the folks that have been talking about this are the newest members of the Senate in the Democratic Party. There are twenty-one of us that arrived in the United States Senate sometime between now and January of two thousand and seven. It’s a pity, pretty big group of senators. And in discussing the secret holds with my colleagues that have been here for a fairly short period of time we decided well why don’t we just quit doing ’em. Let’s quit worrying about whether you’re identifying yourself in six days or whether you’re gonna play the switcheroo and pull your secret hold and put another secret hold in. Let’s just stop it. No more secret holds.

So, we know have drafted a letter to Senator Reid and Leader McConnell, Leader Reid and lead, Leader McConnell. And we have said, first, we will not do secret holds. We’re out of the business of secret holds. We’re not gonna do ’em. And secondly, we want the Senate to pass a rule that prohibits them entirely. If you want to hold somebody, fine. But say who you are and why you’re doing it. Want to vote against somebody, that’s your right. But this notion that you can, behind closed doors, do some kind of secret negotiation to get something you want from the agency, and let’s be honest about it, that’s what a lot of this is. It’s getting leverage, secretly getting leverage for something you want. Well, those aren’t appropriate secrets for the public business. Uh, we have eighty secret holds right now. About seventy-six of those are Republican secret holds. Four are Democratic secret holds. And by the way, all eighty of the ones I made the motion on, all came out of committee unanimously. We even checked on the voice votes to make sure that no one said no in committee. There were no no votes. Completely unopposed out of committee these eighty nominees. For everything from the Ambassador to Syria to U.S. Marshalls to U.S. Attorneys, these are people that need to get to work. And they’re going to pass here. They’re all gonna pass. So we need to get this done, we need to stop secret holds, we need to get these people confirmed, and we need to change the way we do business around here.

So I am, and I want to once again give a shout out to Senator Wyden and Grassley who worked on this issue for a number of years. We are gonna open up this letter to all of the members of the Senate and hopefully, before we find out, we’re all waiting to see what happens in the six days that are looming for all these secret holds, if people step up into the sunshine. If they don’t, in the meantime we hopefully will get unanimous support from the United States Senators that secret holds are now out of fashion and no longer gonna be tolerated in the United States Senate…

Yesterday, I wrote about Claire McCaskill’s war on the secret holds that Senate Republicans have placed on President Obama’s nominees for judicial and government positions – just one of the ways these petty thugs are trying to hinder the administration from achieving its goals. True to her promise, McCaskill, joined by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), returned to the floor of the Senate last night to ask for unanimous consent to vote on 75 more stalled nominations.

The upshot? Egregious Republican stalling. Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz) came to the floor and objected to the request for votes on behalf of unnamed, presumably Republican colleagues.

Since a motion for unanimous consent to vote on a nominee requires the Senator who placed the hold to identify him or herself, and send a letter justifying the hold to be published in the Congressional Record, Senator McCaskill promised that:

… she would be watching the Congressional Record and contacting both parties’ leadership offices to track which Members come forward to reveal their holds in accordance with the 2007 rule. McCaskill said she hopes to either reveal the sources of anonymous holds – or end them all together.

“Hopefully by the end of the week we’ll learn who it is in the Senate that doesn’t want them to be nominated, who it is that doesn’t want them to be confirmed,” she said.

Her goal:

… to pressure Senators “to speak out about their objections so that we can answer them and move forward and get these people to work.”

How effective this will be remains to be seen – what we have now may well be a “let the games begin” scenario. According to Ryan Grim and Ben Craw of The Huffington Post, the Republicans who placed the holds:

…may be able to wiggle out of going public by dropping their holds and picking them right back up, or teaming up with other Republicans and swapping the holds back and forth. It’s never been tried before, so where this is heading is anybody’s guess.

At least in Senator McCaskill we’ve got a dogged participant in the game representing our interests. And perhaps we can exert a little pressure too – phone calls to Senator Bond to express our displeasure with this type of obstructionism perhaps? Some letters to the editors of Missouri papers recognizing Senator McCaskill’s efforts to keep government running, and giving a thumbs down to the Republican performance? Just asking …