Leadership Quote by Tom Daschle

“It would be nice” is doing the heavy lifting here, and that’s the tell. Daschle, a veteran Senate leader, reaches for the mildest possible verb while pointing at one of Washington’s most muscular levers: nominations. The line sounds like housekeeping, but it’s really about power, leverage, and the slow, deliberate churn of institutional combat.

The phrase “clear up” frames stalled confirmations as clutter rather than conflict. That’s classic congressional rhetoric: recast obstruction as backlog, bargaining as bureaucracy. It politely erases the human reality behind nominations - agencies half-led, courts short-staffed, policy stalled - and turns it into a procedural mess that any reasonable adult would want to tidy. The softness is strategic. If you describe holds and filibusters as sabotage, you pick a fight. If you call them “still out there,” you invite cooperation while keeping pressure on the other side.

Then comes the subtle flex: “and there are a lot of them.” Daschle is counting without counting. He’s signaling scale to reporters, donors, and colleagues: this isn’t a single disputed nominee; it’s a systemic logjam. Depending on the moment (a new administration, a divided Senate, a midterm squeeze), that logjam can be either a symptom of partisan warfare or a bargaining chip to extract concessions on unrelated legislation.

The intent isn’t to inform; it’s to normalize urgency without sounding desperate. Daschle’s tone telegraphs competence and restraint, while the subtext whispers: we’re running out of patience, and someone is going to have to pay to unclog the pipeline.