Disir
Platinum Member
- Sep 30, 2011
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Without a reauthorization bill, Congress exerts ad hoc power over State: appropriators can specify funding for different agencies and attach restrictions to the money; lawmakers also find other routes to push their foreign-policy agendas, like inserting provisions into the Pentagon authorization. Meanwhile, the 116-page document that’s supposed to govern State grows slowly obsolete.
Whenever Congress does take up the law, it tends to get hung up on politics and then flame out—often over suspiciously domestic-seeming issues,like money for groups that favor abortions overseas. Partisan fights over the U.S.’s role in the United Nations have also killed legislation.
A big problem is that the members of Congress who head the foreign-policy committees—like Joe Biden and John Kerry, when they were in the Senate—tend to ignore the grunt work of the law and instead focus on the theater of the hearing room.
“Guys like Biden and Kerry cared less about an authorization bill and more about their ability to impact foreign policy by being a diplomat and being a part of the group of unique statesmen, apart from the administration, that could still represent the United States globally,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a senior fellow at a Center for a New American Security who has worked for State and Department of Defense and was previously a staffer at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
[UPDATE: After deadline, a State Department official defended Kerry's work as chair, noting he introduced a reauthorization bill in 2012. "The fact that the State Authorization bill wasn’t passed by the full Senate during his tenure is more a reflection of Senate dysfunction and politics than it is of his leadership and priorities as Chairman," the official wrote in an email.
The State Department hasn’t been authorized in 13 years
I'm over the prima donna BS.
Whenever Congress does take up the law, it tends to get hung up on politics and then flame out—often over suspiciously domestic-seeming issues,like money for groups that favor abortions overseas. Partisan fights over the U.S.’s role in the United Nations have also killed legislation.
A big problem is that the members of Congress who head the foreign-policy committees—like Joe Biden and John Kerry, when they were in the Senate—tend to ignore the grunt work of the law and instead focus on the theater of the hearing room.
“Guys like Biden and Kerry cared less about an authorization bill and more about their ability to impact foreign policy by being a diplomat and being a part of the group of unique statesmen, apart from the administration, that could still represent the United States globally,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a senior fellow at a Center for a New American Security who has worked for State and Department of Defense and was previously a staffer at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
[UPDATE: After deadline, a State Department official defended Kerry's work as chair, noting he introduced a reauthorization bill in 2012. "The fact that the State Authorization bill wasn’t passed by the full Senate during his tenure is more a reflection of Senate dysfunction and politics than it is of his leadership and priorities as Chairman," the official wrote in an email.
The State Department hasn’t been authorized in 13 years
I'm over the prima donna BS.
