When Washington gets back to business, there will be squawking over presidential appointments. Before the Christmas recess, GOPers were charging Senate majority leader Tom Daschle and the Democrats with slow-walking on George W. Bush’s executive branch and judicial appointments. By year’s end, about 70 percent of the top 500 major executive branch positions had been filled–which is not slam-dunk ammunition for the Republicans’ anti-Daschle campaign. But the delays of two nominations in particular have irritated Republicans: Otto Reich, nominated to be Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs; and Eugene Scalia, nominated to be Labor Department solicitor. Reich, an anti-Castro lobbyist, ran a State Department office during the Iran/contra affair that, according to a government investigation, “engaged in prohibited covert propaganda.” Scalia, son of the Supreme Court Justice who greased Bush’s slide into the White House, is a lawyer who represents management in labor disputes and is a harsh critic of ergonomics regulations; his nomination has drawn an outcry from labor. Senate Democrats, blocking the pair for reasons of policy and payback, have turned these two nominations into partisan controversies. But there are other nominees who warrant scrutiny.
§ Gerald Reynolds, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Department of Education. Reynolds, senior regulatory counsel at Kansas City Power and Light, is an avowed enemy of affirmative action. He has been affiliated with several conservative interest groups, including the Center for New Black Leadership and the Center for Equal Opportunity, which have waged war on affirmative action and minority set-asides. The position to which he was nominated enforces all discrimination laws covering the nation’s public schools and universities. It also oversees Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education programs, including sports. Senator Ted Kennedy has raised “serious concerns” about Reynolds, and civil rights groups have assailed his views on affirmative action and his lack of education policy experience. “While we don’t know the nominee’s position on all of the issues that are important to Title IX, his very dogged opposition to affirmative action is very problematic for women and girls in education,” says Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center.
§ Gaddi Vasquez, Director, Peace Corps. Vasquez, a prominent Latino GOP politico in California, resigned as Orange County supervisor in 1995, months after the county, having misled and defrauded buyers of more than $2.1 billion in risky municipal securities, filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. After resigning, he became vice president of public affairs for Southern California Edison. In 2000 he donated $100,000 to the Republican Party. Senator Barbara Boxer, a liberal California Democrat, has endorsed Vasquez, and every Latino member of the California Assembly, Democrats and Republicans, signed a letter supporting his nomination. But a group of outraged former Peace Corps volunteers has been lobbying against Vasquez, arguing that he has no experience in international humanitarian affairs or managing a large agency and that this is not a job for a political hack.
§ Rebecca Watson, Assistant Secretary for Land Management, Department of the Interior. As a partner in a Montana law firm, Watson has represented mining companies yearning to dig up more and more federal land. Previously, she worked for the American Forest and Paper Group, and five years ago she represented a Montana business group battling an initiative requiring mining companies to remove carcinogens from their discharges. Industry groups have hailed her nomination; environmentalists have decried it. “She is a corporate lackey, but she will fit in this Administration like a hand in a glove,” says Jim Jensen of the Montana Environmental Information Center. According to Friends of the Earth, which has been campaigning against her, she represented Montana businesses (unsuccessfully) in a 1999 court case that challenged language in the state Constitution guaranteeing a clean and healthful environment.
§ Eve Slater, Assistant Secretary for Health, Department of Health and Human Services. Before tagging her for this post, the Bush Administration contemplated nominating Slater, senior vice president for clinical research at Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, to be FDA commissioner. That rankled Senator Kennedy, who protested, “You don’t want the fox guarding the chicken coop.” The FDA job didn’t materialize for Slater, but at HHS she will still have to deal with former industry colleagues.
§ Janet Hale, Assistant Secretary for Management and Budget, Department of Health and Human Services. In the 1980s, as a senior official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Hale was a second-tier figure in a HUD scandal that involved politically connected developers winning big-money contracts and favors from the department. The Wall Street Journal reported that while Hale held one of HUD’s highest-ranking positions, she approved waivers of regulations that permitted the construction of a problematic project sought by the former law partner of HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce. Her predecessor quit rather than OK that deal. Hale initialed it and sent the politically wired contract ahead.
These nominations–most of which are for not-so-high-profile jobs–are unlikely to generate the sort of fire and thunder accompanying the Reich and Scalia tussles. But they add new details to the family portrait of a Bush Administration loaded with corporate-friendly and not-so-compassionate conservative appointees.
