Senate inaction on confirmations
Donald Trump spent the four years of his presidency hollowing out the State Department. Now, as Joe Biden attempts to once again make the United States a player on the world stage, Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are continuing the mission of decimating this nation’s foreign policy apparatus.
Their weapon of choice is the Senate’s own arcane confirmation process. The consequences of their separate but equally devastating political vendettas is a scandalous backlog of high-ranking State Department officials and ambassadors now stuck in confirmation limbo.
Nine months into the Biden administration, the Senate has confirmed only two ambassadors — Ken Salazar to Mexico and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. As of Oct. 19, 79 other nominees to various positions at the State Department, including dozens of ambassadorships, were still pending.
These are no small matters to be held hostage to the political agendas of two individuals. Cruz is refusing to allow the nominations to go forward by the usual unanimous consent route because he wants to halt the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would carry natural gas under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, thus bypassing U.S. ally Ukraine. Cruz wants sanctions imposed on the Russian-backed company building the pipeline — sanctions the Biden administration has waived as a gesture to another valued ally, Germany.
Hawley’s “cause” is the disastrous nature of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. He’s vowing to hold up every State and Defense Department nominee until heads roll in both those places — the heads of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, among others.
Yes, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer could bring each and every nomination to the floor of the Senate for a full-scale debate and vote — a process that would take time away from critical votes on the debt ceiling, the infrastructure bill and the myriad day-to-day issues of governing.
According to a tracking system set up by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Services and The Washington Post to track 803 of the 1,200 posts requiring Senate confirmation, as of Oct. 22, 399 Biden nominees have been approved. However, that leaves 224 stuck in the Senate.
When a system can be rendered dysfunctional by two men, then it’s also time to look at changing the system. Part of that would mean dealing with the number of confirmations required. If hundreds can be dealt with by unanimous consent, it’s likely they shouldn’t have to go through the Senate at all.
Those 200-plus nominees being held hostage by Cruz and Hawley need a more immediate solution — and that means pressure, particularly from their GOP colleagues. Someone needs to convince these two that their conduct represents a clear and present danger to this nation’s security and its place in the world.