December 12, 2011

White House Miffed as GOP block La Raza ambassador confirmation

Spoiler alert!
The White House Press Secretary played the obfuscation card today on an ambassador appointment;
Today a partisan group of Republicans in the Senate blocked our Ambassador to El Salvador from returning to her job, choosing instead to play politics with America’s national interests. Ambassador Aponte has served our nation with distinction over the past year, accumulating an impressive list of accomplishments that included negotiating a Partnership for Growth between the United States and El Salvador that is critical to our economic and national security interests in the region.
The first problem is that the Democrat controlled Senate was where the nomination failed;
Senate Republicans on Monday blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee to be ambassador to El Salvador, drawing a sharp rebuke from the White House which accused them of playing politics with the nation’s interests.

On a vote of 49-37, the Senate refused to move ahead with the nomination of Mari Carmen Aponte, a Washington lawyer and Hispanic activist. She has served as ambassador in San Salvador since September 2010 after the president, facing GOP opposition, made her a recess appointee. Her temporary tenure is to run out at the end of the year.
Here's the second problem she served as a director at the National Council of La Raza in one of her roles prior to her recess appointment to her ambassadorship.  La Raza, in case you haven't heard isn't exactly America-friendly;
The progressive politically-connected National Council of La Raza has been a staple (illegal) immigration advocacy group on the left and has long benefited from the generous support of government financial grants. But according to an investigation by Judicial Watch, federal funding of the group “skyrocketed” shortly after one of its top officials got a job in the Obama White House.

Cecilia Munoz, La Raza’s senior vice president and lobbyist, joined the Obama administration as director of intergovernmental affairs in 2009. Since then, Judicial Watch reports, federal funding being poured into the organization has more than doubled...
But it appears, they are nevertheless, well-connected.  The spin on the 'filibuster' nevertheless, will go on but that does not mean the GOP should cave on blocking this appointment, and we shouldn't expect that they will.

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