DANIEL PIPES, a prominent scholar of Islam and Middle East politics, is giving the administration heartburn, but he’ll have a seat on the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace before the Senate gets back after Labor Day. After the White House announced Pipes’s nomination to the Institute of Peace, it was surprised to find that, in addition to the expected full-throated opposition from Democrats (most notably Ted Kennedy, Tom Harkin, and Chris Dodd), several Republicans threatened to flake out on the confirmation vote. This prompted the administration’s decision to install Pipes during the August recess in order to circumvent the Senate.

Pipes’s refusal to back away from radical positions has earned him a respectable cast of enemies. First among them is the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group which has expressed support for terrorists. Kennedy, Harkin, Dodd, and others (not a bad list of enemies in their own right) have signed on to CAIR’s efforts to block the appointment.