Might we get an actual surgeon general again?
Surgeon general nominee likely to get vote, the headline says. Yes, that's what counts as a Senate accomplishment these days.
President Barack Obama’s troubled pick for surgeon general may get a Senate vote before the end of this year’s lame duck session — though it’s not clear if he can win confirmation.
Vivek Murthy, who has drawn opposition for remarks drawing a link between gun violence and health, is likely to get a vote before Democrats hand control of the chamber to Republicans in January, a senior Senate Democratic aide said Monday evening. But winning confirmation is another matter.
You will recall that we currently do not have a surgeon general because the president's nominee once opined that getting shot was, according to available medical evidence, bad for you. That was all it took to send the NRA into full froth and spittle mode, which in turn has been enough to convince the Senate that it would be better to not have a surgeon general
at all rather than have one that thought maybe fewer people ought to get shot these days.
And that's why we didn't have a surgeon general during the entire Ebola "crisis." Because the NRA didn't want one.
None of this is to say that Murthy will necessarily be confirmed, because many Democrats are themselves still all a-quiver at the thought of going against the NRA on the whole "are bullets really bad for you" question. There's just noises that maybe the Senate will deign to have a vote before the Republicans take control at the end of the session, at which point presumably all further government posts will go unfulfilled forever.