Thursday, August 04, 2005

It's not about Bolton

Perhaps the uh, target of my annoyance didn't come out very clear in my last post. The point was not Bolton, (though, yes, I would prefer our reps respect the intention of the international body we created and currently host) but rather, the "We're on vacation" loop-hole giving the administration free reign during one month out of the year. I understand that everyone should get a vacation, but why don't they simply hold the rulings until everyone gets back? I don't understand how this law got passed in the first place, and why, if such things happen once a year in every presidency, has no-one challenged it? Here's a potential presidential nominee on national television, in front of what he hopes to be "his type of voter," declaring his offensive political strategy as: "I'm morally and politically opposed to the administration's policies, but I'll only fight until August, then I'll let them do whatever they want."

1 comment:

Nicole said...

Thanks! Now I don't have to look that up! I figured it was something like that. The law does make more sense in a time when there were few posts to fill and where the senators would have been unreachable during a recess. Getting messages back and forth between the President and senators would make voting impractical, and the number of "commissions" were likely too few to matter. But, every senator now has a staff and a fax and a cell phone and could be contacted immediately for comment. Plus there are so many more appointments now -- more than the writers of the Constitution would ever approved of -- that the impact of the practice scares me.