I have a call into Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a comment on President Bush’s efforts to push John Bolton’s nomination again today.
Speaker Pelosi and President Bush met for lunch today to try and patch up their differences, find some common ground and to see if “bipartisanship” was achievable in some key challenges facing the nation.
Pelosi magnanimously stated:
Thank you very much, Mr. President. Thank you for the opportunity to join you and the Vice President in what I think was a very productive meeting. We both extended the hand of friendship, of partnership to solve the problems facing our country, the challenges that America’s working families face.
I look forward to working in a confidence-building way with the President, recognizing that we have our differences and we will debate them, and that is what our founders intended. But we will do so in a way that gets results for the American people.
The President’s and new Speaker’s comments before the press started at 1:04 pm today and concluded at 1:08 pm.
At 1:22 pm, the White House sent John Bolton’s controversial nomination to serve as US Ambassador to the United Nations back up to the Senate.
Luckily, Lincoln Chafee would have none of it — suggesting that such a nomination is clearly not in the spirit of what happened electorally in this country this week. By 2:15 pm, Chafee put an end to the Bolton confirmation process by fomalizing his previous “informal” opposition to Bolton in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
My question is despite President Bush’s calls for principled bipartisanship and his replacement of Donald Rumsfeld with Robert Gates, how bipartisan is continuing to push John Bolton — whose strident pugnaciousness undermines America’s interests?
This doesn’t sound like the kind of confidence building step from the White House Speaker Pelosi hoped for.
Did President Bush tell the Speaker that he was sending the Bolton nomination back to the Senate? If not, wasn’t that a bit rude to mug her moments after she left his office?
— Steve Clemons
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