Posted on 04/15/2004 2:58:22 PM PDT by ConservativeGadfly
The Cost of Obstruction By Kay R. Daly April 15, 2004
What is the real cost of Senate Democrat obstruction of President Bush's personnel appointments?
One of the first duties of a newly-elected President of the United States is to appoint a team of cabinet secretaries and a host of decision-makers throughout government agencies. In fact, the process of transition between presidential administrations begins long before a President takes the oath of office to fill the more than 800 key political positions available.
From the moment that President Bush was elected, liberals set a course to obstruct as many presidential nominees as possible, fueled by Abner Mikva's admonition in a New York Times column that "the President did not have the mandate of a national plurality" to implement his policies. And yet, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, liberals who did everything possible to delay confirmation of Bush nominees, are now caterwauling about the absence of policies to prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
To hear the talking points from liberal members of the 9/11 Commission, the Bush Administration should have been able to predict and prevent the devastating terrorist attacks on our nation. In fact, several commissioners clearly believe that massive policy changes should have been implemented as soon as President Bush took the oath of office that would have reversed years of devastating military, intelligence and federal law enforcement budget cuts.
In addition, these indignant commissioners seem to believe that President Bush should have been able to instantly change the very culture of interagency communications between the intelligence services. Not to mention the obvious requirement for a battalion of psychics in the Administration to predict the exact time, date, and location of the terrorist attacks.
Trouble is, there didn't seem to be nary a peep from the psychic community before 9/11 and even if President Bush had nominated said psychics to an Administration post, chances would have been good that the Senate wouldn't have confirmed them in time.
According to a column in the Washington Post on August 10, 2001 by Paul Light from the Brookings Institution, "Nearly seven months into the Bush administration, fewer than half of the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet vacancies in the government have been filled."
As of August 3, 2001, the administration had pushed 227 nominations through the Senate but another 265 were pending. Even the 227 confirmed appointees barely had time to install their name plates on their office doors and replace the missing "W's" on their computer keyboards before the hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a desolate field in Pennsylvania.
But liberals, including many members of the 9/11 commission are criticizing the Bush Administration for not moving mountains, walking on water and controlling the time/space continuum by instantly changing decades of entrenched government policy, all without key policymakers in place to do the job.
Even after the attacks of 9/11, the Senate moved with the deliberate speed of a glacier to confirm critical nominees to several agencies on the front lines of the War on Terror. According to a shocking report from the Brookings Institution's Presidential Appointee Initiative, dated November 1, 2001, "one in four senior positions that are key to the government's terrorism response at home and abroad remain unfilled."
As of October 31, 2001, "The front-line positions without a confirmed permanent appointee include the Undersecretaries of the Air Force and Army, the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Chemical and Biological Defense Programs, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, the Deputy Director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, and the Deputy Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration."
But according to Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony to the commission last week, even if the day after the President had taken the oath of office, U.S. forces had invaded Afghanistan, killed Osama bin Laden and neutralized Al Qaeda, he would "have no reason to believe that would have caused them to abort their plans."
It is hard to imagine the level of indignant screeching that would hail from every corner of the Democrat party if the President had launched a pre-9/11 strike on bin Laden based upon the vague terrorist chatter documented in intelligence reports.
Or suppose that Attorney General Ashcroft, fresh from his bruising confirmation battle in January, 2001 had gathered his team in a room in February, 2001 and said, "Alright, now stick with me here. This is what we're going to do. Let's consolidate all the intelligence services and federal law enforcement under one roof so they talk to each other. And let's read everyone's emails and frisk grandmothers at airports. Everyone with me on this?" It is a tough sell in a post-9/11 America. In Pre-9/11 America, it was unthinkable.
It is no secret that the confirmation process, whether for judicial nominations or administration appointments, has become more than contentious. Mired in vitriol and competing political agendas, the confirmation process can be excruciating for any nominee who has the misfortune to be caught in the crosshairs of Senators determined to obstruct at all costs.
There can be no doubt that the mountain of paperwork, hours of interviews and lengthy FBI background investigations contribute to the cumbersome nature of the presidential appointments process. But particularly after Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont made the fateful decision to abandon the Republican Party in May of 2001 and hand the reins of power briefly to an eager, bitter, emboldened and razor-slim majority of Democrats, the United States Senate became nothing short of purgatory for nominees who do not embrace the liberal agenda.
What was once, on average, a two-month confirmation process in President Kennedy's administration has now devolved into a torturous, full contact, no quarter, reputation-shredding ordeal - at a minimum, on average, nine months. And even when the American public handed the majority back to the Republicans in 2002, Democrats began to deploy the filibuster, an unprecedented tactic to obstruct the President's judicial nominees.
Extreme tactics from the left, whether it is the obstruction of presidential appointments or the politicizing of national security issues should come as no surprise to anyone. Indeed, the very formulation of the 9/11 commission itself seems to have originated in a November 5, 2003 memo written by a Senate Democrat staffer from the Intelligence Committee. The memo describes in great detail the Democrat plan to launch an "independent investigation" into "vague" issues of intelligence and national security, timed to coincide with the 2004 presidential campaign.
The American public, weary from years of political spectacles, probably views the 9/11 commission hearings as nothing new in the ongoing saga of gladiator politics. To them, it is probably nothing more than a bad reality TV show with a soundtrack reminiscent of adults from the Peanuts cartoons.
But the reality is that the first duty of government is to protect its citizenry from predators both foreign and domestic. It was the reason why governments were created in the first place. If policymakers are not in place to fulfill that duty, chances are good that things just won't get done.
A pretty simple notion, really. So simple, in fact, that with the roar of the political silly season at full tilt, it has been sadly overlooked, with devastating consequences.
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Kay Daly, president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary, is the host of "The Daly Show" for Rightalk.
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