OntheWilderSide

Shortly after the November 7th elections, President Bush pledged to work with the new Congress in a bipartisan fashion. However, his actions since that time have spoken a lot louder than his words.

The President is now pushing for the confirmation of several highly-controversial nominees to important federal positions, including Appellate Court judges, the post of UN Ambassador, and the Broadcast Board of Governors (which oversees all U.S. government broadcasts overseas). All of these nominations have been stalled in the current Senate for months or years, with good reason, and should be rejected immediately.

• Six judicial nominees, all of whom have previously failed to receive confirmation from the Senate, have now been re-nominated. These nominees include “torture judge” William Haynes, and unanimously ABA-rated “not-qualified” Michael Wallace. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is correct in calling on President Bush to nominate more moderate judges.
• John Bolton has been re-nominated to the post of United Nations Ambassador, despite repeated failures to win confirmation in the current Senate. Bolton is well-known for bullying his subordinates, and twisting facts and fabricating intelligence in order to advance his neoconservative ideology.
• Kenneth Tomlinson has been re-nominated to chair the Broadcast Board of Governors, despite ample evidence of a partisan bias and questionable ethical practices such as cronyism in hiring, double-billing government agencies for his consulting hours, and using government resources to support his horse-racing business.

If the President is truly interested in bipartisanship, he should give up on these nominations and propose better-qualified nominees for these important positions. In the meantime, the Senate should reject these nominations in the upcoming ‘lame-duck’ session of Congress.

Reject the President’s Retread Nominees
The Senate didn’t confirm them before; why should they now? Tell your Senators to reject Bush’s lame-duck re-nominations of unqualified people to important federal positions.

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