Bolton Nomination:
The Senate Foreign Relations committee's attempt to pass Under Secretary of State John Bolton's nomination as UN ambassador ended in chaos. Primarily, the episode illustrates once again the incompetence of the Bush Administration in dealing with Congress, as well as a serious failure of leadership in the Senate. 1) After several days of worrying over the votes of Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.), Republicans were relieved, certain that Bolton's nomination would squeak by in a party-line vote. And they were not alone: Democrats were so convinced the nomination would pass that Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), the committee's ranking member, predicted it before the hearing. 2) Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) even took the unusual step on the Senate floor of objecting to the afternoon committee meeting. This forced Republicans to vote for a three-hour Senate recess, effectively allowing the committee meeting under Senate rules. When Biden failed in his motion to delay the vote again - it had already been pushed back one week - and enter a closed session, Bolton seemed certain to pass the committee. Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) stated that there were ten Republicans present and waiting to vote for Bolton. Neither he nor anyone else expected what happened next. 3) Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), whose vote had never been in doubt, suddenly announced that he did not feel comfortable voting for the nominee. His implausible excuse was that he had not been present for the earlier hearings and wanted to know more about Democratic allegations against Bolton - which essentially involve Bolton's having a bad temper and yelling at subordinates. A passionate presentation by Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) on Bolton's rude treatment of others suddenly caused Voinovich to get cold feet. The effect was sudden and dramatic. Republicans had gone from "sure thing" to total defeat and public humiliation. 4) The allegations against Bolton have the trappings of reasonable concerns, but are political at their core. They essentially revolve around Bolton's reaction to intelligence analysts, one of whom refused to approve part of a 2002 speech he was about to give. The speech, delivered at the Heritage Foundation, touched on Cuba's germ warfare capability. Democrats contend this shows that Bolton, like other Bush Administration officials, is a serial exaggerator of claims that hostile nations have weapons of mass destruction. 5) But in fact, this issue was merely a convenient segue - picked up unwittingly by other Democratic senators - from Dodd's regular practice of attacking anti-Castro officials. Dodd, a dogged supporter of normalized relations with Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba, ran Otto Reich out of the government by blocking his Senate confirmation as assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. In this case, Bolton came under fire from Dodd for questioning the assessment of Cuban arms by a CIA officer who is notorious inside the national security bureaucracy for faulty judgments on not only Cuba but also Haiti and Colombia. 6) Voinovich had every opportunity to make his opposition to Bolton known prior to the committee meeting. Evidently he did not, or else Lugar never would have called the hearing, and Frist would never have allowed a floor vote for the Senate to recess. Voinovich also created a major embarrassment for Chairman Lugar, whom he blindsided. Lugar appeared fully committed to ramming Bolton through the committee, despite Democrats' desires to drag out the process and defame Bolton as much as possible in an effort to intimidate and weaken him. In the end, lacking the support to pass the nomination, Lugar postponed proceedings for three weeks, giving the Democrats time to do just that. It is now anyone's guess whether Chafee and Hagel will stand by Bolton once the Democrats are done tearing him down. 7) Lugar bears some of the blame for yesterday's fiasco, but the burden of getting the nominee through Congress rests ultimately with the White House. With yesterday's failure, the Administration reached a new low in its already notoriously poor handling of the Republican-controlled Congress. Voinovich's support was apparently just taken for granted, with no one bothering to ask. Social Security:
Even as President Bush's plan for private accounts appears less likely to pass, conservative leaders are quietly taking account of the debate's likely consequences. Their views are surprisingly, but understandably, optimistic. 1) President Bush won both of his elections after making plain statements in support of Social Security reform involving personal accounts for younger workers. The Social Security issue has ceased to be the "Third Rail of politics" it once was. This is in part because of Bush's willingness to broach the topic, and in part because of the gradual dying off of the generation that depends on the government system for retirement. Even if reform does not come now, today's debate may pave the way for future reforms. 2) The issue also worked in Republicans' favor in the 2002 elections - its supporters won, whereas several Republicans who did not back reform, including then Rep. John Thune (R-S.D.), lost their races. This does not mean that the position against reform is unpopular, only that the position in favor is not deeply unpopular enough to cost the GOP in elections. It did not hurt Republicans in 2004, either. 3) Importantly, several Democrats, sensing the threat that outright Social Security reform poses to their electoral future, have voiced interest in a compromise involving so-called "add-on" accounts. These are personal savings accounts that do not involve diversion of payroll taxes. The Democrats' rhetoric, although meant to blunt Bush's momentum toward private Social Security accounts, opens the door to a reform package long sought by Republicans and which Democrats had earlier resisted: the so-called Lifetime Savings Account (LSA), also known as a Retirement Savings Account (RSA). 4) This would be essentially a Roth IRA with a very high annual contribution and a high income limit, if any. Like the Roth IRA, the LSA would allow post-tax money to be invested and drawn down tax-free at retirement. The LSA would supplant the current low-contribution Traditional IRA - which involves investment of pre-tax money, to be taxed later at the time it is drawn down. 5) The LSA plan would be a tax cut that actually adds revenue to the budget in the short term by eliminating pre-tax retirement accounts. It is a political winner for Bush if he chooses to accept it as a "compromise" on Social Security.
