Do you mean drafts or not yet approved (by workflow)?
In either case, sure it's possible, but would you really want to?
I mean, if you're talking drafts, I save a draft all the time not because I want to publish it but more because I don't want to lose what work I've done. Even if the publication date is reached, well to me it's still a draft and not ready for publication.
If you're talking not yet approved by workflow, again it may not be approved because the approver hasn't had a chance to look at it yet. May be an indicator that you have too much work for the current approvers to handle and you need to increase the size of the approval pool. That said, if you're going to automatically publish without approval, why have approval anyway? And what happens if the content has something the approver would have rejected but you've automatically published it anyway and how to take that back?
As far as showing the list (of either), yes that's possible. You can get to the drafts and the pending approvals and display them, but I'd really consider the impact of auto-publishing and why it might actually be a bad thing...
