Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio arenāt only taking their campaigns onward to South Carolina. While the next Republican primary commands the publicās attention, both are also running for president by mounting quiet symbolic protests at American embassies around the world.
A single senator has nearly unilateral ability to block any confirmation, whether heās in the Capitol or on the hustings hundreds of miles away. The junior senators from Texas and Florida are using their power to place indefinite āholdsā on diplomatic nominees, hoping to highlight their own foreign policies and their condemnations of President Barack Obamaās conduct of international affairs.
Both campaign rivals have been pursuing the tactic since last year, yet another way theyāre using similar approaches to advance their White House quests while leading their Senate lives. (Voting alike far more often than not during their three years together in Congress is the most obvious example of that.)
Rubio has focused his ire on a single would-be ambassador, Roberta Jacobson, nominated last spring to become envoy to Mexico after three decades working on Latin America in both Democratic and Republican administrations. Her disqualifying sin, in Rubioās view, has been leading negotiations on the recent diplomatic, commercial and travel rapprochements with Cuba as an assistant secretary of state.
Cruz, as is his wont, has launched a more sweeping and dramatic effort. He has a blanket hold on all eight pending ambassadorial nominees considered āpolitical,ā meaning they come from outside the career foreign service. His initial aim was to build leverage for blocking the nuclear agreement with Iran. Since that didnāt work, the obstruction has been labeled a protest against both the six-nation deal with Tehran and Obamaās overall approach to world affairs.
The standoff has come only briefly into view a few times before this week. On Monday, Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota went to the Senate floor and announced that, until Cruz relents, she would make a parliamentary move almost every day seeking roll call votes for filling the two long-vacant embassies in Scandinavia.
(Thereās some parochial motive to her cherry-picking approach. More Norwegians live in her state than anywhere else but Norway, and the nominee for Oslo is Minneapolis lawyer and human rights activist Sam Heins, who raised more than $1 million for Obamaās re-election. Klobuchar also has thousands of constituents with Swedish heritage; the nominee for Stockholm is another Obama fundraising bundler, retired California investment banker Azita Raji.)
āHow can one senator stand in the way of a vote affecting relations that are 200 years old?ā
Inside the Cruz and Rubio Ambassadorial Proxy War
Seriously? What kind of idiocy is this?
A single senator has nearly unilateral ability to block any confirmation, whether heās in the Capitol or on the hustings hundreds of miles away. The junior senators from Texas and Florida are using their power to place indefinite āholdsā on diplomatic nominees, hoping to highlight their own foreign policies and their condemnations of President Barack Obamaās conduct of international affairs.
Both campaign rivals have been pursuing the tactic since last year, yet another way theyāre using similar approaches to advance their White House quests while leading their Senate lives. (Voting alike far more often than not during their three years together in Congress is the most obvious example of that.)
Rubio has focused his ire on a single would-be ambassador, Roberta Jacobson, nominated last spring to become envoy to Mexico after three decades working on Latin America in both Democratic and Republican administrations. Her disqualifying sin, in Rubioās view, has been leading negotiations on the recent diplomatic, commercial and travel rapprochements with Cuba as an assistant secretary of state.
Cruz, as is his wont, has launched a more sweeping and dramatic effort. He has a blanket hold on all eight pending ambassadorial nominees considered āpolitical,ā meaning they come from outside the career foreign service. His initial aim was to build leverage for blocking the nuclear agreement with Iran. Since that didnāt work, the obstruction has been labeled a protest against both the six-nation deal with Tehran and Obamaās overall approach to world affairs.
The standoff has come only briefly into view a few times before this week. On Monday, Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota went to the Senate floor and announced that, until Cruz relents, she would make a parliamentary move almost every day seeking roll call votes for filling the two long-vacant embassies in Scandinavia.
(Thereās some parochial motive to her cherry-picking approach. More Norwegians live in her state than anywhere else but Norway, and the nominee for Oslo is Minneapolis lawyer and human rights activist Sam Heins, who raised more than $1 million for Obamaās re-election. Klobuchar also has thousands of constituents with Swedish heritage; the nominee for Stockholm is another Obama fundraising bundler, retired California investment banker Azita Raji.)
āHow can one senator stand in the way of a vote affecting relations that are 200 years old?ā
Inside the Cruz and Rubio Ambassadorial Proxy War
Seriously? What kind of idiocy is this?
