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Unearthing Skeletons From the Political Pumpkin Patch
By Robert E. Martin
The month of October brings a tinge of madness to the air and one thing is certain: there is no shortage of skeletons to be unearthed from the political pumpkin patch this Halloween season. So lets get started. The Harriet Miers Nomination Discovering the track record of Associate Justice nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court Harriet Miers promises to have more in common with digging through the lost tomb of the Mummy than with law when it comes down to figuring out who she is and what she would likely bring to the High Court of the land.
This is because not only is there nothing
in terms of archival information to be delivered to the Senate; but more
importantly, because Miers is not known to have ever done a day's work
in any branch of the national government before she joined George W.
Bush's White House staff in 2001.
Before that, apart from a late-nineties stint as head of the Texas Lottery Commission under then Governor Bush, she devoted herself to the interests of corporate clients (and of Bush, from the earliest flaps about his National Guard service right up through the Florida recount).
So what do we know about Miers?
Only that President Bush nominated his personal lawyer and long-time
friend to Sandra Day O'Connor's crucial swing seat on the Supreme
Court. With no judicial experience and an extremely thin public record,
even leading right-wing pundits such as Pat Buchanan are calling
her "transparently a crony" with "non-existent" qualifications.
President Bush has refused to release any
documents from Miers' time in the White House on the grounds of
"executive privilege" and claimed he could not "recall" any
conversations with Miers about abortion over 10 years of friendship and
legal service.
We do know that when Miers was Bush's
appointee to head the Texas State Lottery Commission, the lottery was
accused by a former director of awarding multi-million dollar no-bid
contracts to a technology firm represented by former Lieutenant Governor
Ben Barnes. Barnes has since said he helped Bush escape active duty
in Vietnam, and the lottery director alleged that Barnes demanded (and
under Miers received) the lucrative public contracts to keep quiet about
Bush's military service.
We also know that Miers was hired as
legal counsel on both Bush's Gubernatorial campaigns. Among other
things, her research was used to persuade a local judge to excuse then
Governor Bush from jury duty, a civic task that would have forced him to
disclose his 1976 arrest for drunken driving in Maine. He was then able
to keep his arrest secret until late in the 2000 presidential campaign.
Other than this, there isn't much to go
by. Fortunately, the call to reject cronyism and secrecy is bipartisan.
As conservative columnist George F. Will put it, "The president's 'argument' for
Miers amounts to: Trust me."
However the Miers nomination turns out,
the fact that Bush submitted it serves as perfect litmus test for his
character.
Consider this.
In the Federalist No. 76, Alexander
Hamilton writes that the Senate's role in confirming appointments is
designed to make the President "both ashamed and afraid to bring
forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates
who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which
he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally
allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy
to render them the obsequious instrument of his pleasure."
This should certainly give us pause to
shutter as a country, as under the present scenario, President Bush
seems more intent upon placing the pursuit of extremism on the front
burner than he does any notions of balance.
More Buggy Nominations We've all heard the terrible warnings about the risk of an influenza pandemic from an avian flu virus. Indeed, the likelihood of mass numbers of people dying from Avian Flu in the United States run a higher probability than the likelihood of us experiencing another terrorist attack.
Yet we are totally unprepared.
Why? Because once again the
administration official in charge of making sure America is ready has no
experience related to his job-he's a political appointee.
Stewart Simonson is the Bush
administration's point man for flu pandemic, but he has no public health
management experience. He got his job because he is a close associate of
former Health & Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.
Readers may recall that during the 2004
Presidential election, the shortage of flu vaccine became a political
issue during last year's campaign under Thompson's watch.
Simonson is Assistant Secretary for Public Health Emergency Preparedness at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). His job before joining HHS was as corporate secretary and counsel for Amtrak when Thompson was chief of the rail service.
Prior to Amtrak, Simonson was staff
lawyer for Thompson when he was governor of Wisconsin. In short, he is
not qualified for a public health job that hundreds of millions of
people are counting on.
This isn't just a case of resume
inflation. Simonson doesn't seem to have a grasp on the very important
work he is supposed to be doing right now.
At a hearing in the House of
Representatives in July, Simonson claimed he had the money he needed to
purchase influenza vaccine and antiviral medication.
But the very next day, his office
submitted a funding request to Congress seeking an additional $150
million for flu vaccine and antiviral medication. And just last month
the Congress gave another $4 billion for the effort.
The Department of Health and Human
Services is about to announce a new influenza plan. They need a highly
qualified and respected professional at the helm when implementation of
the plan begins.
The revelations about Simonson's lack of
experience couldn't come at a more challenging time. The New York
Times has reported that the nation is gravely unprepared for flu
pandemic after obtaining a draft of the HHS influenza plan.
We have only 2 percent of the courses of
antiviral treatments we'll need. The plan predicts a worst-case scenario
in which nearly 2 million Americans would die and 8.5 million would be
hospitalized. Costs would exceed $450 billion.
Finally, the report says we need to
expand vaccine-manufacturing capacity by more than ten fold.
There are qualified people who could do
this important job. Simonson replaced a genuine expert, Jerome Hauer,
who had served as Director of Emergency Management for New York City and
led the George Washington University Response to Emergencies and
Disasters Institute.
Many people are calling Simonson the
"next Michael Brown" in reference to the lack of experience of
the former FEMA director who botched the federal response to Hurricane
Katrina.
Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) released a fact sheet about cronyism in the Bush administration that blew the whistle on Simonson.
The threat of an influenza pandemic is
very serious. The 1918 flu pandemic is estimated to have killed 50
million people-the largest numbers dying in just weeks. In the 1950s and
1960s smaller flu pandemics in the United States killed tens of
thousands.
Our government needs a serious response
to this serious threat. Please act today and voice your concern to
Senators & Congressmen.
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