Washington – Senators launched a long-awaited debate Wednesday on John Bolton’s hotly contested nomination as U.N. ambassador, with Democrats leveling a new allegation in a last-ditch effort to defeat him.
The start of the debate signaled the final stage of the fierce, 2 1/2-month partisan struggle over President Bush’s most controversial foreign policy nominee.
Senate Republicans said they hoped to close the debate and vote on Bolton’s nomination Thursday. But Democrats were considering whether to refuse to end the debate – a tactic that could threaten a truce reached only days earlier on the use of the filibuster.
Confirmation of the conservative, blunt-spoken State Department official seemed assured, though Democrats could succeed in delaying the vote on Bolton until after next week’s congressional break.
One unknown factor for the White House seems to be Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., picked by Bush as a rising Republican star.
But just months after winning election – and defeating Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle – by telling voters his ties to Bush would help save their military base, Thune is facing a new situation.
In South Dakota, his constituents are furious over the Pentagon’s plans to close Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City, the state’s second-largest employer.
“I’ve said all along that I’m going to play whatever cards I have to get the best possible outcome I can for my base,” Thune said Wednesday.
Right now, Thune’s options include hedging on a matter of utmost importance to Bush, the Bolton vote.
“I’m undecided on Bolton,” he said, “and I guess that’s where I would leave it.”
And at least one Republican aide said Wednesday that Thune had told a fellow senator he was contemplating voting against Bolton to send a message to the White House about Ellsworth.
For more than a month, Bolton has faced a rigorous congressional investigation into allegations that he sought to manipulate intelligence and bullied analysts who disagreed with him. His nomination was so controversial that members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee forwarded it to the full Senate without a recommendation that he be approved.
In the new allegation against Bolton made Wednesday, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Bolton may have mishandled U.S. intelligence material.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Bolton appeared to have shared information about a National Security Agency electronic intercept with another State Department official “without required NSA approval.”
The agency had directed that “no further action be taken on this information without (its) prior approval,” Rockefeller said in a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, adding he was “troubled” by the allegation.
Some Democrats reiterated complaints that they cannot judge the issue properly while the administration refuses to provide classified documents.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said that a delay in the vote would be a protest against the administration’s failure to share information, not an attempt at filibuster.
The New York Times contributed to this report.
