Nation: Recess appts for "emergencies," not to bypass confirmation process

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050815&s=iwilliams

Kofi Annan greeted the recess appointment of John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations in a measured way that was perhaps intended as a nuanced put-down: "We look forward to working with him, as I do with the other 190 ambassadors. And we will welcome him at a time when we are in the midst of major reform."

While Bolton supporters on the far right greeted his appointment as if he were Wyatt Earp coming to clean up Tombstone, which is in fact pretty much how Bush presented him, Annan subtly put him on a par with the Permanent Representative of Nauru, which has the size and population of an average Manhattan block, and hinted that the process of UN reform was already proceeding apace without his coming to the rescue.

Of course, subtlety and nuance are lost on both Bush and Bolton. The conservatives who applauded the President's courage and leadership in making a recess appointment are normally strict constructionists, and although Bush is by no means the first President to abuse the prerogative, it is clear that recess appointments were meant to be be used in cases of unexpected emergencies, not to bypass the confirmation process.

Bush did indeed stress the urgent need for the appointment because of the reform agenda before the sixtieth-anniversary summit of the UN. But the President has not really explained how he is assisting reform by sending to New York someone who has vocally dismissed the relevance of the organization, and whose record includes finding weapons of mass destruction where no one else could find them but losing his memory about recent interviews by the State Department's Inspector General.

[Supersedeas]

1. sublety and nuance are lost on * & Bolton--what about their supporters

[journalist3072]

2. Exactly on point...

Take President Clinton's recess appointments. Many of those recess appointments were for judicial nominees who could not even get a hearing in the Judiciary Committee. They were denied hearings.

And because of that, the vacancies on the courts became an emergency. You cannot dispense justice if you don't have judges to carry out that justice.

So I think Clinton was totally justified in his recess appointments.

Bush was not.