The
Dems have again held together to block the cloture motion on John Bolton's nomination. I heard a clip from Joe Biden on Ed Schultz' show where he basically said that the White House doesn't get to decide what the Senate may need to evaluate an appointment.
Of course, this was the likely outcome -- and the impending Independence Day recess will be the point where GWB will send Bolton to the UN as a recess appointment (based on all the scuttlebut).
The only drawbacks are that:
1) We still end up with Bolton at the UN, doing little to further the image of the US in the eyes of the world.
and, most importantly,
2) We'll (or, more to the point, the Senate committees) will apparently never see the info on the NSA intercepts requested by Bolton to be able to determine which US officials he was spying on.
I thought I'd update to link to the
senate roll call vote.
Look, I know I'm not the first on this, but I thought another smaller thread might be useful for additional discussion.
As noted in the comments below, the Dems had a few defectors (Pryor, Nelson and Landreu). One other thing I'm curious about is what happened to the estimable Democratic nominee -- who seems to be only one of 8 who didn't get the memo on this.
Where the hell was Kerry and what was he doing that was more important than this vote?