Mr. Levin's Obsessions
WSJ.com
When John Kerry was running for President, he let it be known that Michigan Senator Carl Levin was on his short list for Secretary of Defense. Mr. Levin has apparently taken Mr. Kerry's loss very hard, because he is now behaving as if no one else should run the Pentagon.
From his perch as ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Levin has been running a one-man assault on civilian appointees fighting the war on terror. He currently has a "hold" on no fewer than four nominees selected by President Bush for key national security posts: Eric Edelman for Undersecretary of Defense of Policy, the No. 3 position at the Pentagon; Peter Flory, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy; Alice Fisher, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department's Criminal Division; and Benjamin Powell, general counsel in the office of new Director of National Intelligence.
[Carl Levin]
Keep in mind that we are now seven months into Mr. Bush's second term and in the middle of a huge, post-9/11 change in U.S. security strategy. Yet Mr. Levin is denying an elected President his choice of officials to staff the government at this crucial time. Mr. Levin had his chance to make a policy argument against Mr. Bush last year, but he and Senator Kerry lost the election. His hassling of civilian officials now looks like obsessive political revenge.
In the case of Ms. Fisher and Mr. Powell, Senator Levin is dressing up his objections as related to the U.S. policy on detainee interrogations. That policy fight was also waged all last year, but now Mr. Levin wants the Bush administration to turn over more documents. He's also insisting on a personal interview with an FBI official who complained about alleged abuses at Guantanamo in an email that Mr. Levin thinks may implicate Ms. Fisher, who was chief deputy to Michael Chertoff when he ran the Justice Department's Criminal Division.
Ms. Fisher denies knowing about the official's complaints; the Justice Department interviewed the FBI official, who says Mr. Levin is misconstruing his email. And Attorney General Alberto Gonzales personally asked the Senator to permit a vote on Ms. Fisher's nomination. He refused. So Justice remains without a key player in its anti-terrorism investigations.
Meanwhile, over at the Pentagon, the Levin holds on Messrs. Edelman and Flory are even more blatantly political -- since by the Senator's own admission they have nothing to do with the nominees, whom he says he "supports." In the case of Mr. Edelman, nominated in May, Mr. Levin is blocking a career diplomat, whose most recent post was Ambassador to Turkey. Mr. Flory, named in June of 2004, is a longtime Defense official and Capitol Hill aide. Both are being blocked because they have been nominated to work in the Policy office, run until last week by Captain Levin's great white whale, Douglas Feith.
Mr. Levin is desperately seeking facts to fit his fantasy that Mr. Feith abused intelligence reports in the leadup to the Iraq war. The Defense Department has spent hundreds of man-hours fielding Mr. Levin's requests for documents and delivered up thousands of pages. The Senate Intelligence Committee looked high and low for evidence of abuse but found nothing; it issued a bipartisan report last summer that didn't touch Mr. Feith. Still, the Senator isn't satisfied.
Mr. Levin's obsession has even become too much for John Warner, the ever-accommodating Armed Services Chairman, who encouraged Mr. Bush to give Mr. Edelman a recess appointment. The President did so this month, along with Mr. Flory. But unless the Levin holds are lifted and they are confirmed by the Senate, the two men can serve only until the end of this Congress, in January 2007 -- or just when they've been in the jobs long enough to hit cruising speed.
When various Beltway sages say that "the confirmation process is broken," this is what they mean. In pursuit of their own personal or partisan goals, Senators like Mr. Levin are damaging the ability of the executive branch to function. Instead of getting an up or down vote, any potential Presidential appointee knows he can end up in a state of suspended nomination for months, and even years. Many will say, Why bother?
Now may be the time for Majority Leader Bill Frist to use his authority to ignore a hold and move a nomination to the floor for a vote. The holding Senator has procedural options that could tie up the Senate, and Republican Senators would object to losing their destructive toy as much as Democrats. But it would set a precedent whose eventual, and welcome, result would probably be the demise of holds.
More broadly, by refusing to vote on the President's nominees the Senate is weakening its own role in the confirmation process. The Constitution gives the Senate advise-and-consent power over nominations, and Presidents have traditionally used their recess appointment power sparingly. If the Levins of the Senate continue to pursue their vendettas, Presidents may well start planning their nominations with recess appointments in mind. |
