EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (CONT’D): Politico: Sure looks like Biden botched FDA pick — thanks to the Left.

More than a year after taking office in a pandemic, Joe Biden still hasn’t gotten his pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration confirmed. What’s more, Politico reports, it doesn’t look like the White House is doing much about it. Robert Califf’s limbo has less to do with Republican intransigence and more to do with Biden’s progressive allies. . . .

What in the world does Politico’s team mean by GOP support being a “first public sign of trouble”? Republicans don’t have too many reasons to pull Biden’s chestnuts out of the fire, but they’re not the reason Califf can’t get confirmed. Technically, Democrats don’t need any Republican votes to confirm a nominee as long as Vice President Kamala Harris is in town to cast a tie-breaking vote. Having four Republicans support a Biden nominee in committee isn’t a “public sign of trouble” — it’s a green light, especially for someone who served in the same position in the Barack Obama administration. The real trouble is coming from the Left, and for the reasons you’d imagine, but you have to scroll down a bit from Republicans pouncing® to learn it. . . .

The key question here isn’t Republican pouncing® or progressives’ ongoing hysteria over the corporations, man. It’s that the White House apparently didn’t care what happened to Califf after nominating him in mid-November, almost ten months after Biden took office in the middle of a pandemic. Califf had to have been on Biden’s Rolodex almost from the beginning, so why did it take so long to nominate him to run the one agency in charge of all the vaccines and therapeutics necessary to deal with the COVID-19 scourge? Or anyone, for that matter? This should have been one of the first appointments Biden made outside of Cabinet officials.

The sort of leadership we’ve come to expect.