If you’re looking for a good laugh this week, you probably can’t do better than Tuesday’s White House press conference. Reporters asked spokesman Josh Earnest about the confirmation of two Obama-appointed ambassadors whose confirmation was only possible because Democrats manipulated Senate rules earlier this year to make it easier to approve executive-branch nominees.
By the narrowest of margins, two people completely unqualified to represent U.S. interests abroad were confirmed to serve in relatively important countries they know nothing about. Colleen Bell, the new U.S. ambassador to Hungary, is a former soap opera producer who couldn’t name a single strategic interest the United States has in Hungary at her confirmation hearing. Noah Mamet will now represent U.S. interests in Argentina, a country he has never even visited. Mamet reportedly does not speak Spanish.
What both of these unqualified ambassadors have in common is that each raised more than half a million dollars for President Obama’s re-election campaign.
Obama is not the first president to sell ambassadorships to big-shot fundraisers. But there is a reason why the American Foreign Service Association, which rarely opposes ambassador nominations, has taken the unusual step of vocally opposing these ones. AFSA, the union representing Foreign Service officers, notes that nearly half of Obama’s second-term ambassadorial appointees have been political choices rather than career diplomats.
But more to the point, it would be hard to find even political choices quite as unqualified as these two, especially given that both are headed to countries that have major problems at the moment. In Hungary, protests have been raging for a month now against an increasingly authoritarian president who has been steering his country away from the West and toward Russia’s influence. Argentina’s government was recently found in contempt of a U.S. court for attempting to cheat American holders of its bonds with a selective default.
In short, these aren’t the ambassadorships to Fiji or Vanuatu that can be tossed off as a favor to some bored billionaire — these are serious jobs that require serious people. Not only has Obama dealt a needless snub to both nations by signaling we don’t take their affairs seriously, but he has installed two people in positions where they will not be up to the task of handling potentially emerging crises.
There is a mechanism in our Constitution designed to prevent this sort of “victor takes the spoils” system, in which rulers simply hand out huge jobs to unqualified friends. It is called the Senate confirmation process. Democrats weakened that process this year by cheating.
Changes to Senate rules require 67 votes out of 100, but Democrats under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid changed the Senate rules with a simple majority and a dishonest parliamentarian. Reid justified the move, known as the “nuclear option,” in high-minded terms as a necessary step to stop Republican obstruction and ensure a functioning government. But now it has devolved into a tool to override common sense in the confirmation process, making it easier to hand out gifts to political patrons, and in the process, weakening U.S. standing abroad.
