[Avenger42]

People keep saying this like he's the person who chose Pai. The way these commissions work is:

- it's staffed by members of each party

- each party's leaders (typically in the Senate) choose the people who will be appointed

- the President typically rubber-stamps those appointments

- the President at the time really only gets to choose which member of the commission is the Chairman

So if you want to blame someone for Pai, you should be blaming Senator McConnell for telling President Obama "here's the Republican we want you to put on the commission".

[lostapathy]

Not disagreeing with you - I'm taking issue with the parent poster who wanted to blame this on trump. There's plenty of blame to go around in our government, but it doesn't all fall on Trump (as the post I replied to implied)

[Avenger42]

True, but the parent poster didn't blame it on Trump, he blamed it on the Republican party:

> But it's predictable that one party would have appointed someone like him and not the other.

It is fair to blame this vote on Republicans, given that the vote fell along "party lines".

[alexeldeib]

The general point being: it goes back to elected officials.