I guess the issue I’m worried about is that we’re basically asking them to put aside their domestic concerns for the good of NATO and their european partners, and we’re not putting aside our domestic issues long enough to appoint a diplomat for them.
And I don’t blame the Democrats for spending their limited Senate time on mostly domestic positions, but it can’t help them sell other countries on international obligations.
Of course everyone is thinking internally right now, which is likely part of the reason Putin is taking this opportunity to generate a crisis and possibly invade.
They understand it. But do they respect it? Asian cultures (and others) might place a lot of importance on titles and dealing with equivalent ranks. The notion of ambassador as pure figurehead probably is not always true. And countries want to think they are an American priority even when this is not so.
Maybe at some shallow, international point scoring, populist level. But for anyone well informed, I suspect the message is not:
“we are upset with you”
which is what pulling one’s ambassador out normally means but rather
“our government is increasingly dysfunctional, and has so much infighting at the highest level that they can’t even get their shit together sufficiently to appoint an ambassador”.
“We have always been contemptuous of you. We are merely prioritising that those who are contemptible are of lesser importance than those who are despicable.”
Bear in mind that in the US, there are literally thousands of executive branch positions which require Senate approval. The issue is not solely about ambassadors, though that is a very visible instance. An opposing Senate, if it wished, could block anyone from being appointed to any significant office at all.
Leaving aside the value of micromanagement to this degree, one half of the US body politic thinks as a matter of policy that having nobody appointed to any significant office within the US government apparatus at all is actually a good thing.
It’s not just an opposing Senate. Any single senator can block most appointments simply by objecting, which forces at least a cloture vote. The Senate doesn’t have the time, under its current practices and procedures, to hold that many votes. The Senate held 528 recorded votes in the 2021 session, which looks like a recent record, if not an all-time record; that could have been for as few as 264 matters, if each one required a separate cloture and final vote (but not all would have).
Do they think that though? I don’t think it’s about micromanagement.
I’m probably like a stuck record about this point but my view is the R’s have simply discovered there is no electoral penalty for reflexively jamming the gears of Dem administrations, even if the whole country loses. Quite the contrary, the Dems will get the blame. So they have no hesitation in blocking everything they can, either absolutely or on terms, because it has no downside and may even have an upside.
The Wiki cite below indicates there are “approximately 1200-1400 positions require Senate confirmation” and that this number, if not substantially more, seem to have existed from times before the GOP decided to use it as a political tactic, as you correctly suggest.
Why else would there be so many Senate confirmable positions except for micromanagement?
It needs to be pointed out the largest bloc by far are judicial but include:
Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom
15 to 21 Directors of the National Institute of Building Sciences
I’ve read that there have been quite a lot of studies that show when the party in power is able to get its measures through, they get the electoral benefit, not the other party. When they fail to get their policies through, they get the electoral blame, not the minority party.
In other words, the electorate does not seem to appreciate the significance of the minority party in the congressional system.
You’re the leaders of the minority party and you see those studies. What do you do? You could say, “we’ll keep working with the majority and take the risk they’ll get more support.” Or, you could say, “Hmmmm ….”
Traditionally the system worked because all parties thought government could provide services to its citizens. Though there were many disagreements within and between parties, most concluded:
democracy should be protected
a system of rules and laws is needed
citizens would punish childish petulance
the overall goal is to advance the country
the system has generally worked, generally kept the peace, generally provided most with a reasonable quality of life
stable funding for the government was an obvious no-brainer
You could reasonably argue some of this and find counter-examples. But the decisions above, gridlock at any cost, is a pretty recent innovation and these decisions would have been shameful not so long ago. One can argue whether half of the electorate agrees with the position, or whether they support a party in general and naively trust the above (and archaic) conclusions.
Wikipedia has a page on divided governments in US history and it looks like the current era of frequent power shifts and divided government is actually pretty rare in US history.
For long stretches in US history there were essentially no divided governments, and a lot of the periods where divided government became more frequent, there would only be a situation with one of the parties getting unified government, or a divided government, so it wasn’t quite the same dynamic that we have now.
It’s possible that our system was just never really tested under these conditions in the past where we have frequent divided governments and unpredictability about who is capable of getting a trifecta in the future and there is more of an incentive to play hardball.
Obviously this might be a case of mixing cause and effect - we could be faced with a tumultuous power balance because more legislative hardball is occurring - that would align with Newt Gingrich’s theory that the GOP had been too content to be a permanent minority in the house and needed to start fighting dirty and trying to beat the Democrats.