By the time George W. Bush arrives in the “Highlands Riviera” of Scotland just after the Fourth of July for this year's G8 summit, John Bolton may already be the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. This will require a presidential recess appointment, a constitutional flip-off to the Senate that may not improve the president's slumping poll numbers at home or provide him with an easy icebreaker when he meets with the leaders of the industrialized world.
But the White House will count it as a win, because the new rule of the game is he who makes the other side madder wins.
Who better than the tough-talking, rough-riding undiplomatic diplomat to carry the tough news that Washington wants the world to hear -- that we have no intention of forgiving all that African debt, and that we do not believe that all this business about the holes in the ozone is all that it is cracked up to be?
John Bolton: the right man, at the right time!
But it now seems clear that the Bolton nomination is sunk forever. In fact, more senators were willing to vote against the ozone this week than were willing to vote for Bolton's cause. The climate-change amendment offered by John McCain and Joe Lieberman would have capped greenhouse gases at 2000 levels by 2010. It was defeated by a 60-to-38 margin, a huge Bush victory that affirmed the White House's approach, which is to encourage industry to fix the problem voluntarily.
Republicans need 60 votes to end the Democratic-led filibuster against Bolton. They don't have them, and there seems little prospect of getting them. But in the smackdown politics of Washington, retreat and compromise are discredited options (and I say this despite the little hiccup that was the nuclear-option deal).
As things stand, there is no chance whatever that the White House will accept defeat and take the graceful course, no chance it will pull down the nomination and replace Bolton with someone more palatable to the few Democrats it needs to end the filibuster.Earlier this week, the man who effectively doomed the Bolton nomination, GOP Senator George Voinovich of Ohio, said that he had suggestions for the White House about alternatives to Bolton. Without naming them, he practically guaranteed that they would have quick and easy confirmations.
Voinovich would not reveal his list, but that is just as well, because the White House is not interested and its message to the Hill is Bolton or bust. “John Bolton is the right man to represent us in the United Nations,” asserted Majority Leader Bill Frist. “He is a straight shooter, a man of integrity, is exactly what we need at the United Nations, exactly what the United Nations needs from us.”
The tone of what the United Nations will get from us in the near future is embodied in the House-approved UN reform bill, which basically lays out a sledgehammer-and-guillotine approach to dealing with the world body. Though the administration was against many of the important provisions in the bill, the basic idea that the UN needs a kick in the butt is a shared value. The bill outlines huge sanctions of withheld dues if the UN does not embrace the list of reforms set forth.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said that the United Nations had become too weak for the world. But there is a line of argument that's says if you send Bolton to New York and these House sanctions becomes law, the eventual effect is a weaker United Nations and, eventually, a weaker United States.
“Instead of wielding a big club -- a demand destined to fail -- Congress should give any new UN ambassador the chance to seize the current moment of opportunity,” writes Ann Florini, a scholar in foreign-policy studies program at the Brookings Institution.
But even as chances of Bolton's confirmation ebb away, it is exactly the kick-in-the-butt doctrine that is sustaining him. The president wants Bolton, and the president is going to get Bolton. So despite the frustration and the embarrassment of not being able to get him confirmed in a Senate where the GOP enjoys a 10-seat margin, the administration will push ahead. And there is nothing Democrats can do to stop it.
Delaware Democrat Joe Biden, furious that the White House will not let the Senate see National Security Agency documents connected to Bolton, has been asking repeatedly, “Who died and left them boss?” Sometimes he credits his mother with the quote, sometimes his grandfather.
But the Bushies are not accustomed to losing, and they don't take no for an answer, so when yet another cloture motion on the Bolton nomination fails, and Democrats continue their filibuster, the president will show them who is boss.
Sometime in July or August, when Congress is in recess, the president will install Bolton in the post through a recess appointment, allowing him to serve until the end of the current Congress (the end of 2006).
Democrats will be upset. Some will lament the collapse of the system of checks and balances; others will say it is the same kind of dogged insistence on having it the president's way that led to the war in Iraq and the chaotic aftermath. They will look at the polls and say that people are finally coming to grips with what has happened -- and is happening -- in Iraq, and that what happened last election day was a lagging indicator of how the American people really felt about the war and the president. Democrats will be mad, and the White House will look at its new man in New York and count it as a win.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
