The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee verbally voted Thursday morning to advance Department of Energy nominees for general counsel and two other posts for consideration by the full Senate.
During the business meeting, the committee endorsed the nomination of Samuel Walsh to be DOE’s general counsel, Andrew Light to be assistant secretary for international affairs and Shalanda Baker to be the agency’s director of the Office of Minority Economic Impact.
The session was webcast. After the voice vote on Baker, a couple of Republican senators did ask to be formally recorded as voting “no” on her nomination.
Walsh, a former DOE deputy general counsel who is now partner in a Washington law firm, was nominated by President Joe Biden in April and had her confirmation hearing in June.
The same nomination-and-hearing timeline applies to Light and Baker. Light is a philosophy professor at George Mason University in Virginia who is also a distinguished senior fellow in the climate program at the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C. Baker is already at DOE as a senior adviser, according to her online bio. Prior to taking that post in January, Baker was professor of law, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University in Boston. She was also co-founder and co-director of the Initiative for Energy Justice.
The voice votes on the three DOE nominees were a fairly hum-drum affair compared to the debate, involving Committee Chair Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Ranking Member Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and others, over the nomination of Tracy Stone-Manning to be director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management. The vote ended in a 10-10 deadlock, which will allow Stone-Manning to be voted upon by the Senate.
Republicans called upon President Joe Biden to withdraw the Stone-Manning nomination, who while a graduate student in 1989 wrote a letter on behalf a group Barrasso called “eco-terrorists” who planned to drive metal spikes into trees that were scheduled to be cut down in Idaho — a move that could endanger the safety of loggers doing the work, the Washington Post reported.
The Biden White House has yet to nominate anyone to become assistant secretary in charge of the $7-billion-plus Office of Environmental Management, as that job continues to be filled on an acting basis by career federal servant William “Ike” White.
