Bush Uses Congressional Recess to Make 3 Controversial Appointments

By Jim Rutenberg

President George W. Bush has used the congressional recess to push through his choice to be ambassador to Belgium and to fill two domestic policy positions – provoking Democratic ire with all three appointments.

The ambassadorship will be filled by Sam Fox, a major Republican donor who withdrew his name for the job in late March when it became clear that Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were lining up against him.

Fox donated $50,000 to the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that opposed Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, during his 2004 presidential campaign. The group attacked Kerry’s war record with advertising that included unsubstantiated charges that he had not properly earned his war medals.

“It’s sad but not surprising that this White House would abuse the power of the presidency to reward a donor over the objections of the Senate,” Kerry said in a statement Wednesday. “Unfortunately, when this White House can’t win the game, they just change the rules, and America loses.”

The use of “recess appointments” allows a president, when Congress is out of session, unilaterally to install people in jobs usually requiring Senate confirmation. These appointees can stay in place without Senate confirmation through 2008.

The White House announced the appointments as Bush visited an army training base in California and called on Congress to drop a push by Democrats to attach timetables for withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq to approval for emergency war funds. Though Bush and the new Democratic leadership in Congress pledged just three months ago that they would work cooperatively, they are now on a collision course over the role of Congress in foreign policy and the administration’s dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys.

In another appointment that provoked Democrats, Bush appointed Andrew Biggs, a champion of privatization, as the deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in February that he would not take up Biggs’s nomination, made in 2006, because of his stand on Social Security.

Baucus said Wednesday, “Prospects for getting real Social Security reform anytime soon just took a big hit with this recess appointment.”

Democrats also complained about the appointment of Susan Dudley to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget, a powerful position that involves review of regulations from major federal agencies.

Dudley has written that government regulation is not warranted “in the absence of a significant market failure,” alarming consumer and environmental groups. Bush nominated her in August and again in January, with Democrats vowing to block her.

“Clearly, these are politically provocative acts,” Sarah Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Democratic caucus in the House, said, referring to the three appointments.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said that all of the appointees were qualified and that the Democrats were to blame for forcing the president to resort to recess appointments.

In a fourth recess appointment on Wednesday, Bush named Carol Waller Pope, a Democrat, to be a member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

Pope was first appointed to the three-member board in 2000 and served until her term expired last year. Democrats and unions had urged Bush to renominate her because otherwise the board had only two members, both Republicans.

The president used his visit to the military training facility to again criticize the Democrats for their legislation tying future war funds to timetables for withdrawal.

Listing what he said was evidence of progress in Iraq, Bush said, “Just as the strategy is starting to make inroads, a narrow majority in the Congress passed legislation they knew all along I would not accept.

“Their bills impose an artificial deadline for withdrawal from Iraq,” the president continued. “Their bills substitute the judgment of Washington politicians for the judgment of our military commanders.”

(c) 2007 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.