Clipping the wings of America's hawk flying into the UN

[emad]

April 19, 2005
Times
Foreign Editor's Briefing

Clipping the wings of America's hawk flying into the UN
By Bronwen Maddox



FIRST the President picks his people, then he waits months while the Senate grills them, to see if they will allow him his choice.

There is nothing in British government quite like it, and more’s the pity. It is not just the drama of the solitary figure sitting in front of a microphone, faced by a half-circle of nearly 20 senators. The hours of interrogation, playing to the cameras in the senators’ home states, take on the air of a trial.

But the spectacle is also one of the most inspiring constructions of the US Constitution: an often bruising reminder of Congress’s ability to circumscribe the executive. In the case of John Bolton, President Bush’s extravagantly controversial choice for US Ambassador to the United Nations, the Senate’s approval looks all but certain.

The Foreign Relations Committee is expected to vote today on party lines: ten Republicans and eight Democrats. The only one in doubt has been Lincoln Chafee, a moderate Republican from Rhode Island, who is up for re-election next year. But everything Chafee has said in the past week gives the sense that he will back Bolton.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1575277,00.html

[pansypoo53219]

1. well, that toady colon bowell

said he didn't really need that info bolton withheld.