It was another surprisingly good day in the Senate yesterday when Dems, once again, blocked John Bolton’s nomination to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The Senate voted 54 to 38 to end debate on Bolton’s nomination. That was six votes short of the 60 needed to stop filibusters in the 100-member chamber. It suggested that Bolton has lost ground since May 26, when 57 senators voted to end the filibuster before one of them switched for parliamentary reasons.
It was another defeat for Bush and another setback for Bill Frist’s leadership of the chamber. The question then becomes what the Republicans are going to do about it.
Media reports this morning note that that the president may continue to press for a confirmation vote, though it’s hard to see why anyone would bother. The administration refuses to provide lawmakers with background documents they feel are necessary in weighing Bolton’s record, so the nomination isn’t going anywhere. They could schedule votes every day for the rest of the Congress and it wouldn’t make much difference.
The more likely scenario is a “recess appointment,” which would make the noxious partisan atmosphere on the Hill even worse than it is now. (Yes, that’s possible.)
Pressed on the possibility of a recess appointment, White House spokesman Scott McClellan did not rule it out but said: “We continue to urge the Senate to let him have an up-or-down vote on the floor.” […]
Recess appointments allow a president to temporarily seat a nominee while Congress is out of session. They invariably ignite charges of partisan abuse, and Democrats complained bitterly when Bush used recess appointments to place nominees on federal courts in his first term.
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), a Bolton supporter, said a recess appointment “would weaken not only Mr. Bolton but also the United States” because the international community would see the new ambassador as lacking bipartisan support.
That’s true, but for the Bush White House, this isn’t about effective diplomatic abilities at the United Nations, it’s about picking a fight and beating a perceived enemy. If that means circumventing the Senate and the confirmation process by simply forcing Bolton’s nomination through without lawmakers’ consent, so be it.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan had an excellent description of this scenario last night. Calling the move “beyond precedent,” Kaplan notes that the dynamic doesn’t make a lot of sense. If Bush was prepared to force Bolton’s nomination, he could have done so from the outset, instead of allowing the process to unfold and allowing the nation to learn what an awful nominee he is.
[Bolton] has been through confirmation hearings at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which passed the nomination to the floor without endorsement; and he has twice failed to gain the three-fifths majority of a cloture vote. In other words, other stealth appointees have dodged anticipated bullets. If Bolton slips through, he will have been strafed, hit, and mortally wounded — then resurrected by a magic wand waving on the president’s outstretched middle finger.
Will Bush escalate this battle to the next level and simply brush aside the Senate? My guess is, he will. Otherwise, why would he have taken the fight as far as he has? Why would he have kept today’s cloture vote on the schedule? Surely he and his whips knew they didn’t have enough support to win. The Senate Democrats had made a case against cloture on two grounds — not just on Bolton’s dreadful qualifications for the job, but also on Bush’s refusal to turn over documents relevant to the Senate’s investigation. It was clear that, since last month’s motion, the White House had lost — not gained — ground. Most likely, the president and his spokesmen will now repeat, with renewed intensity, what they’ve been saying for a while now — that the Democrats are obstructionists, that a majority of the Senate favors Bolton, and so he should simply be placed in the job if need be.
Still, President Bush might want to reassess the situation, and not just because Bolton is a lousy pick — a judgment that Bush does not share, in any case. He might want to consider the following question: At a time when he is touting the glories of democracy, does he want his ambassador at the United Nations — America’s global spokesman — to have come by the job through such undemocratic maneuvers?
This assumes Bush is concerned with principle and consistency. He isn’t.