On Friday, Rachel Maddow focused attention on the efforts of doomed North Carolina Republican Senator Richard Burr (up for re-election in 2010, makes Liddy Dole look like the homecoming queen) to block the nomination of Tammy Duckworth to be an assistant secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs. It's not just that Duckworth is herself a double-amputee decorated Iraq War veteran, she has an actual trackrecord doing virtually the same job for the state of Illinois, and earning high praise for it. So, naturally, someone to put a hold on, right?
Maddow handles this appropriately:
The NY Times? Not so much.
This the Times weighed in with "balance"-blinded look at growing GOP obstructionism towards Obama nominations, in which Duckworth figured not at all. She wasn't the only missing, however. Putting too many nominees into the story might be confusing. It might give folks the wrong idea. And so, we got a story with just two nominees mentioned, and only one discussed in any detail at all: "Storm Clouds Gather Over Obama Nominees". (Storm clouds "gathered" as if by magic. Look, ma! No hands!)
I hope to have more to say about this later this weekend, but I want to make a quick comment about the Republican's announced intentions to investigate Attorney General designate Eric Holder, as reported on in The Hill, and commented on by Digby. The Hill reports:
Senate Republicans have requested information about Attorney General nominee Eric Holder's role in the Elian Gonzalez controversy as part of a broad probe into his tenure with the Clinton administration and potential ties to presidential scandals during that era. [Emphasis added.]
I've already stated my misgivings about Holder, but I'm the kind of guy who learned to walk and chew gum back in grade school, and the habit is still with me. So, just a couple of quick questions:
(1) Aren't some of the things they're asking for normally considered legal work product?
(2) Aren't presidential advisors supposed to be able to offer advice freely, without the prospect of Congressional or other outside investigations that would chill their free expression of ideas?
(3) Didn't the Bush Administration and it's defenders in Congress and the media make these arguments over and over and over again when it came to all sorts of questionable conduct, involving criminal matters such as the outing of Victoria Plame, the cooking of intelligence, the planning and execution of illegal wiretaps, illegal detention and torture?
(4) And, aren't these sorts of considerations under #2 and #3 at least modestly relevant when there is absolutely no hint of an underlying criminal act? Particularly in contrast to all the criminal activity that was shielded during the Bush Administration?
(5) Finally, given that there isn't any sort of indication of any sort of criminal activity, isn't this what's commonly known as a fishing expedition? And wasn't that pretty much the dominant theme of GOP politics during the Clinton Era?
Now I am not one who thinks members of legislative bodies need attend every single vote, as they have other valuable duties that do not relate to casting ballots in the chamber. I am forgiving about them skipping some votes when running for higher office. I certainly defended Kerry from such silliness in 2004. After all, it's not as if Bush wasn't diverting a great deal of executive branch time toward running for re-election, just because his record can't be congealed into a handy percentage of votes attended and missed, doesn't mean there aren't consequences to the number of hours a President spends electioneering instead of presidenting. I can hardly resist noting that to conservatives, there is no practical difference between activities geared to seeking power and those geared toward exercising it. We didn't need Scott McClellan to note that the Bush team has erased even the lip-service to a distinction between policy and politics.
That all said, when a Senator is running for President against another Senator, it does seem pretty fair to compare their voting attendance records, and more meaningfully, note which votes they attend and skip. To that end, after reading a pretty decent AP piece today on Durbin's Democratic radio address, I discovered they (and everyone else) buried the lead: John McCain skipped a decisive, time senstive vote which resulted in a key funding measure for Medicaid failing to achieve cloture against yet another anti-democratic Republican filibuster. He was the deciding non-vote.
