If the Republicans who run the U.S. Senate had any sense, they would have let Carol Moseley-Braun quietly slip off to Auckland to enjoy a nice rest.
President Clinton has nominated Moseley-Braun to be the ambassador to New Zealand, a nation of 3.5 million people and 47 million sheep, a nation that was granted independence from the British and has hardly made a peep since, except to win the occasional America’s Cup.
When was the last time an international incident was sparked by New Zealand? This was a safe choice.
But Republicans have an amazing ability to pick the right fight for all the wrong reasons, and that’s what they did here.
Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has kicked up a fuss over Moseley-Braun’s nomination, which has to be approved by his committee.
If Helms wanted to make an issue of would-be ambassador Moseley-Braun, he had plenty of ammunition. Her six-year term in the Senate was chock-full of bad judgment calls.
Normally that wouldn’t disqualify her. When it comes to choosing ambassadors, presidents have a tradition of fitting a few diplomatic pros into the tough spots and using the rest of the world to reward political loyalists with government-paid sightseeing trips. New Zealand has some beautiful sights.
But unlike most ambassadors-in-waiting, Moseley-Braun methodically built a case for why she shouldn’t have the job.
You would have thought that when Moseley-Braun lost her Senate seat in 1998, everyone could put to rest her infamous secret trips to Nigeria, the trips that cost her that Senate seat when Illinois voters tossed her out. Instead, Clinton has put up Moseley-Braun for the one job where those Nigeria junkets become important again.
So let’s rehash it. In August 1996, Moseley-Braun slipped away on a secret trip to Nigeria, where she met with one of Africa’s most murderous rulers, Gen. Sani Abacha, and her former fiance, Kgosie Matthews, who was once a paid agent for the Nigerian government.
She didn’t tell her staff she was going. She didn’t tell the White House she was going. She didn’t tell the State Department.
The U.S. ambassador to Nigeria learned the senator was there when he read about it in the local papers.
She blundered into Nigeria at the same time that then-Rep. Bill Richardson was in the country as an official presidential envoy.
She was highly secretive about why she was there and who paid for the trip. Over time, it came out that she had made half a dozen trips to Nigeria. She was roundly criticized by African-American leaders for consorting with a butcher.
It was only the worst moment in Moseley-Braun’s tenure, one that was marked by undiplomatic actions and words. Early in the would-be ambassador’s tenure she responded to press criticism by saying she felt like she had been “raped.” Late in the would-be ambassador’s tenure she responded to a critical column from George Will by likening him to a Ku Klux Klansman. This was not diplomatic language.
And all that would be grist for a confirmation hearing in the Senate, and reason enough for the Senate to tell her the Pacific Rim was not in her future.
But in six years of controlling Congress the Republicans have proven nothing so much as they can’t read the public, and they just did so again.
Last week, Helms said in a Capitol Hill newspaper that he would put a brick on Moseley-Braun’s nomination. Why? He picked out the single best thing she did in six years in the Senate.
“At the very minimum, she has got to apologize for the display she provoked over a little symbol for a wonderful group of little old ladies,” Helms said.
That was in 1993, when Moseley-Braun objected to Helms’ move in the Senate to renew a trademark for the emblem of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The emblem featured a Confederate flag, and that, Moseley-Braun said, was offensive as a symbol of slavery. She won. The Senate reversed itself and voted not to approve the trademark.
It was a purely symbolic victory. To this day, the United Daughters of the Confederacy uses the same insignia, a Confederate flag surrounded by a laurel wreath. When the Senate rejected the patent, the organization simply went to the U.S. Patent Office and got it listed as a registered trademark. So the U.S. government still “sanctions” the emblem of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Moseley-Braun’s move was important at the time because it said that the Senate wasn’t going to be the same old place, now that it had its first African-American woman on board. Of course, now it looks like it is the same old place. Jesse Helms still is in power, and Carol Moseley-Braun is not.
And Jesse Helms will be in charge of the committee when Carol Moseley-Braun comes up for confirmation. But make no mistake, she will hold all the cards.
A day after the Roll Call story hit the streets, Helms tried to recover by saying Moseley-Braun’s confirmation hearing would focus on other controversies in her past, pointing to her Nigeria trips.
It was too late. It will not matter what Helms and his crew haul up about Moseley-Braun’s track record in the Senate. The confirmation hearing will come down to North versus South, abolitionists versus the Confederacy, Helms’ scowl versus Moseley-Braun’s smile.
It will come down to Jesse Helms’ ugly desire to see this black woman finally be put in her place.
The Republicans have lost another one. Whether they send Moseley-Braun off to Auckland or back to Chicago, they’ve lost again.
