Members of Congress have left Capitol Hill for the holidays and won’t return until the new year, but senators made one last important move before heading to the airport. NBC News reported:
The Senate [on Thursday night] voted along party lines, 53-43, to confirm a third batch of Trump nominees all at one time using a new procedural tool it unlocked by nuking the Senate rules so it can confirm nominees en bloc instead of one by one.
Tonight’s batch consisted of 97 nominees, including former Rep. Anthony D’Esposito of New York to be inspector general of the Labor Department and Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell III to be U.S. ambassador to South Africa.
D’Esposito is a highly controversial figure in his own right, but let’s not brush past the latter too quickly.
When Donald Trump was still rising to GOP power a decade ago, Bozell was a critic of the then-candidate. Trump noticed: In 2016, he accused Bozell, a conservative activist and media critic, of having visited his office and “begging for money like a dog.”
In time, however, Bozell, who leads a group called the Media Research Center, became a Trump admirer. And earlier this year, the president chose him to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
When that didn’t go well — the White House pulled the nomination in March — Trump nominated him for a different post: U.S. ambassador to South Africa. This time, Senate Republicans went along.
There’s reason to believe they made the wrong choice. TPM reported in March that Bozell, in the 1980s, was critical of Black activists in South Africa who fought against their country’s racist apartheid government, and Media Matters has highlighted the conservative activist’s rhetorical record, which does not lend itself to a career in international diplomacy.
In recent months, the United States’ relationship with South Africa has deteriorated to levels unseen in recent memory, thanks in large part to Trump’s sustained offensive. With Senate Republicans sending Bozell to Pretoria, it’s hard not to wonder whether the relationship is poised to get worse.
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