Have you heard about this?
From CNN.COM today:
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush named Republican fundraiser Sam Fox as U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Wednesday, using a maneuver that allowed him to bypass Congress where Democrats had derailed Fox’s nomination.
Democrats had denounced Fox for his 2004 donation to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group’s TV ads, which claimed that Sen. John Kerry exaggerated his military record in Vietnam, were viewed as a major factor in the Massachusetts Democrat’s losing the election.
Recognizing Fox did not have the votes to obtain Senate confirmation, Bush withdrew the nomination last month. On Wednesday, with Congress out of town for a spring break, the president used his power to make recess appointments to put Fox in the job without Senate confirmation.
This means Fox can remain ambassador until the end of the next session of Congress, effectively through the end of the Bush presidency.
May 28th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Democrats have done the same thing. Its politics and legal get over it
May 29th, 2009 at 12:22 am
So what? More political sword play. And no, I didn’t hear.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:22 am
There has been no president who has been better at doing an end run around the constitution than President Bush. In addition to recess appoints of Fox and Ambassador Bolton (to the U.N.), some of the ways he has gotten around the constitution include:
- Keeping prisoners in Cuba so that they will not have easy access to the courts.
- Getting a law passed that takes away the power of the courts to hear Habeus Corpus petitions from the prisoners in Cuba.
- Using signing statements that state his interpretation of a law – in order to have an excuse for ignoring the will of congress.
- Spying on people without a warrant under some kind of a theory that it is legal.
-Distorting the language of the Geneva conventions so that he has an excuse to torture prisoners – and then making the torture techniques a classified secret, so that the prisoners can’t talk about them, even with their own lawyers.
- Declaring that certain people, including some U.S citizens, are not entitled to the protections of the criminal law, such the right to a speedy jury trial and the right to confront and cross-examine witnesses, on the theory that they are enemy combatants and then making it difficult or impossible for these people to get a fair hearing on the issue of whether they are an enemy combatant .
June 1st, 2009 at 2:18 am
So What. Why should someone that helped expose Kerry be persecuted?