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A Letter to (soon-to-be former) Senator Judd Gregg.

By: Flagstaff (Diary)  |  February 3rd, 2009 at 07:32 PM  | 

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I emailed the following letter to Senator Gregg a few minutes ago.  I expect to hear back from him sometime in March.  I don’t know what year.

Dear Senator Gregg:

We ask you to please reconsider your decision to abdicate your seat in the US Senate in favor of a far less significant position in the Obama Cabinet.  There are several reasons you should reverse course and stay in the Senate.

First, you campaigned for the Senate seat in New Hampshire, and the people of your state confirmed that you were the person they wanted in that seat.  You have two more years, at least, to serve.

Second, you will join in that Cabinet with an Attorney General who could not recognize the folly of pardoning Marc Rich and Puerto Rican terrorists, and who agreed with the raid on the family of Elian Gonzales which resulted in his return to Communist Cuba.  You’ll be rubbing elbows with a Treasury Secretary who was either a tax cheat or a financial accounting dunce, and whose ethics compel him to pay up on evaded taxes only to the point where he’s protected by the statute of limitations.  You’ll sit at the same table with a Secretary of State couldn’t distinguish between being shot at on a runway in Europe and imagining it later.  And YOU’LL be sitting at the kids’ end of the table.  Do you really want to associate with these people, rather than the tax cheats, dunces, and delusionals in the Congress?  You are forced to associate with the latter group by reason of the electoral process; you’ll be associating with the former group by choice.

Third, your Republican colleagues (and the American people) NEED you in the Senate.  We understand that you are a steadfast defender of fiscal responsibility, and that’s precisely the quality most needed in the Senate this year.  While the lady who is proposed as your replacement may be, as she said herself, a “reasonable” Republican, you must recognize that “reasonableness” is exactly NOT what the Republicans need in the Senate at this time.

Fourth, you are well aware that the Commerce Department is a minor player in the affairs of Government, and you’ve already voted to abolish it.  You will also be on the opposite side of many, if not all, issues from President Obama, and he’ll be in the position of being able to either ignore you or order you to enact policies you strongly disagree with.  Will you not wonder that perhaps he selected you to neutralize a feared opponent in the Senate?

Finally, Tom Daschle set a precedent today:  if your nomination to a Cabinet position is not beneficial to the American people, you should withdraw from consideration, even if your nomination has already been announced and accepted.  Nobody will think less of you for it, even President Obama.  After all, shouldn’t we all act on our own principled convictions?

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COMMENTS

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  • Han_Pritcher

    That President Obama wanted Senator Gregg badly enough that he was fine with Governor Lynch naming a Republican to the seat.

    Guys, I get that you want my party’s agenda to fail. That’s fine and fair, far as I’m concerned. That doesn’t mean that you have to ignore data that’s inconvenient to your existing view of the world.

    I voted for Barack Obama instead of another Democrat (in my state’s primary) because I fully expected him to do things like name Judd Gregg to his cabinet without insisting on flipping a Senate seat.

    You don’t have to like, admire, or agree with the man to at least admit he meant at least SOME of what he said during the campaign. I wanted to see at least three Republicans in the cabinet, and it looks like I get my wish.

    Sure, you think Gregg is selling out and taking a demotion, and I’m not here to tell you otherwise. I just don’t get why I saw a ton of comments wherein many RedStaters predicted that Obama would “steal” the seat (I did not come up with that on my own, that was from a comment) and that this was his real reason for the nomination.

    If Obama went into this looking to flip Gregg’s seat (and I believe that had to be on his mind at the start) and at no point actually gave a fig about bipartisanship or putting Gregg at Commerce, why would he STILL have named him after Lynch said he’d name a Republican?

    • Mike gamecock DeVine

      It increases the possibility that Obama will hear good advice on economic policy.

      • Han_Pritcher

        Most of the people who knew Barack Obama when he was coming up in the world agree that he seeks out opposing views, even if he doesn’t go their way. This is consistent with that.

        I don’t want him to conform the bulk of his views to Gregg’s, but I damned well want him to hear them.

        • Jeff Weimer

          He’s used that tactic since his days at the Harvard Law Review. He did it once during the Iowa primaries (abortion protesters at a rally). He’s even done recently it with Petraeus. Somehow, it never even comes close to actually changing his mind or modifying his position substantially. It just allows him to be seen as “listening” to their concerns. He still signed the overseas abortion funding order, he still told Petraeus he’s “not convinced – give me a 16 month withdrawl plan”. I get the feeling Gregg will be talking to a brick wall, Obama’s ideology is closer to his Labor Secretary’s, so I’m sure she’ll get more traction.

          • Han_Pritcher

            NT

          • mbecker908
          • olsmithie

            I forget which rule of the communist organizer Obamanation is invoking by picking Gregg.

            Regards

          • mbecker908

            The hell of it is, it works and it works well.

            Communists don’t know diddly squat about actually running a government, but they are the poster boys for acquiring power, and for keeping it for at least a while (typically about 75% longer than they should be allowed to have it).

            Actually – and somebody should do a blog on this Streiff, are you listening – the thing that “may” blow up in BO’s face is his dismissive treatment of the current crop of combat successful Generals. I don’t know if his apparent demands to Petraeus about a withdrawal timetable and his demand for a 10% budget reduction (and I’d throw out a list of military base closures in Dem districts, but that’s another story) from the Pentagon will be enough to trigger mass resignations of people who are perceived by the American People to be the very best, but I sense that might be a losing show down for BO.

            I understand that when Clinton ordered the Army, Navy and Air Force to integrate women with men in their boot camps the first draft also included the Marine Corps. Clinton was allegedly informed that every Marine Corps General Officer from the newest one-star to the Commandant had a typed letter of resignation on his desk citing “integrated recruit training” (USMC PC for boot camp) and the resulting degradation of the Marine Corps’ ability to fight and win as the result of said change. He took the Marine Corps off said list.

            There are some people that even Presidents don’t screw with.

          • Jeff Weimer

            And I’d much rather not be patronized.

            If I actually see him take a stand on an issue that was fundamentally informed by this opposition opinion, then I’ll think he’s serious.

            Deeds, not words my friend. Deeds, not words.

            I was initially intrigued by his intellectual seriousness in this regard, but they have, so far, been nothing but symbolic gestures. Granted, he’s only been at the job a couple of weeks, so there’s plenty of time for him to impress me with his actions.

          • Flagstaff

            Senator Gregg “acted on” my request. He said it was a minor point, but I also heard it called a “catalytic” development. And we know that a catalyst is the agent that brings about the change.

            There were obviously undercurrents in that nomination that we weren’t aware of at the time. Probably all the guesses were correct.

        • AceInTX

          This is what’s wrong with the Republican and I can’t think of anything that put’s the incompetence, vapidness and sheer stupidity of our leadership than this foolishness.

          So…Obama and his machine make a naked and blatant appeal to Greg’s ego asking him to join his cabinet in an attempt to shift the Senate even further in his favor by either getting a Democrat Governor in New Hampshire to pick a Democrat to replace him thus getting closer to the 60 votes he needs to crush Republicans on anything he wishes to push through.

          So what does Greg and the Republicans do?

          Greg accepts the position thus stoking his ego and giving Obama the ability to claim “Bipartisanship and showing his magnanimity in putting someone from the enemy camp into his cabinet. Then Greg and the brilliant strategists in the Rep party pat themselves on the back for getting the Governor of NH to appoint a moderate/squish Republican to replace Greg who will go along with many of Obama’s policies where Greg would not have and at the same time giving Republicans a seat to defend with a weak freshman Senator and a likely pick up for the Democrats in 2010!

          Priceless!

          • olsmithie
          • AceInTX
          • Flagstaff

            But I really did write the letter to him, and your words might have been considered a bit rude in that context.

            I don’t know just how good we are with Gregg in the seat, but we are worse with him out of it.

    • mbecker908

      Gregg doesn’t matter. The Senate Republicans couldn’t get 100% of Republican Senators to vote together on cloture if the bill was calling for summary execution of Republican US Senators.

      All this crap about “60″ Democrats is nothing more than a distraction.

      That said, the idea that Gregg is going to give TheOne™ “good advice” on the economy is a joke. That’s what the Secty of Tax Evasion’s job is. Let’s face it, the Commerce Dept is nothing more than a place where politicians go to die. In some cases, literally.

      • Han_Pritcher

        And I love your hypothetical, by the way.

        Who’d be the nay vote? Voinovich?

        • mbecker908

          I would offer up: McCain, Graham (although he’d likely vote the same way McCain did, being a clone and all), Specter, the ME girls, Senator V, and, of course, Gregg.

          The idea of “discipline” exists only in the Democratic Party, and I am openly jealous of their ability to hold members whole bodies to the fire. A lesson that gutless, brain-dead, unprincipled Republican leaders should take to heart.

          And, FYI, the only reason I probably get your name right is because Franz Prince of Dogness had a brother who lived with us for 10 years and his name was Hanz, brother of the Prince of Dogness. I suspect most folks don’t have much exposure to any variant of your name, something I’m also jealous of since I’ve spent a good portion of my life looking over my shoulder wondering who was yelling “Hey Mike!” at me when it wasn’t me. :-)

    • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

      He went with a scandal-free Republican Senator when the first choice blew up in his face. :)

      As for your other question… there are a bunch of Democratic Senators from states that have GOP governors (other way around, too). It’s sort of like the tacit ban of poison gas in WWII: nobody wants to be the first to break it.

      Moe Lane

      PS: That being said, the Gregg pick doesn’t particularly exercise me.

    • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

      I’d have been more impressed he was trying to be bipartisan if he’d gone to an expert outside of Congress. That would have eliminated the reasonable suspicion of political calculation, as I’m not aware that Gregg has outstanding qualifications . So I won’t award him points

      On the other hand, nobody twisted Gregg’s arm or made him an offer he couldn’t refuse (to my knowledge) to accept the position in a department that he’s previously voted to eliminate – so I won’t award Obama demerits either. Gregg always could have politely declined.

      Thus I see most of this as a tempest in a teapot, the kind of political junk food that political junkies like to snack on but that really has little import on the key issues facing our nation. It really doesn’t have any substantive effect on the basic dynamics of the Senate (as mbecker particularly has argued) nor will Gregg’s being Commerce Secretary likely be a transformational event.

      I will look to more nutritious actions to judge Obama performance. But discussions on those items are matters for another post.

    • Flagstaff

      Was in too big a hurry to answer. I even forgot to hit “Reply to this.” My response is below.

  • Mike gamecock DeVine

    Did you miss the fact that Hillary Clinton is in the cabinet and that she is the ONLY reason the FALN pardons were issued? Holder was a flea on that matter. An apparatchik.

    If we get GOP replacement vote for him, then he is not needed. These pols are glorified yea/nay voters on simple issues. No great skill required.

    And in the cabinet, he will increase the likelihood Obama will hear some sane advice.

    All in all, ho hum.

    What matters is defeating or radically amending the stimulus bill that could wreck this country by growing the govt by 30% permanently!

    • olsmithie

      The idea that the “One” would take advice from a mere Republican requires me to “suspend belief.”

      Regards

    • Flagstaff

      I think Gregg is much more likely to be effective opposition to the porkulus bill than will his replacement, based solely on the short clip I saw of her saying she would be a “reasonable” Republican.

      I did mention Mrs. Clinton by reference, but I defer to your memory that I was wrong to ascribe the FALN pardons to Holder.

      I don’t think Gregg is indispensible, but I keep hearing that he is a solid conservative Republican, which is rare in New England and in the Senate, for that matter.

      I have no hope that Obama will pay the slightest attention to sane advice. But it’s true that he’ll at least hear it.

      • Mike gamecock DeVine
  • Flagstaff

    that of course I don’t know. But I can make some guesses that might be different from yours. You say you want to see someone here acknowledge “That President Obama wanted Senator Gregg badly enough that he was fine with Governor Lynch naming a Republican to the seat.” I’ll acknowledge that, but it still leaves the question of motive up in the air. There is also the question of why Gregg has accepted.

    I have heard (CNN) that Gregg is philosophically 180 degrees out of sync with Obama’s opinions on trade and US commerce. Perhaps he wants someone in the Cabinet who will give him a broader outlook on trade and business policies.

    Or, maybe he agrees with Gregg that Commerce is a useless department that should be eliminated, and he’s using it as a vehicle to get Gregg out of his opposition and under his thumb. If you saw the short interview with Gregg’s proposed replacement, you saw a woman who is in no way committed to a conservative approach to government.

    “why would he STILL have named him after Lynch said he?d name a Republican?”

    Perhaps because Obama had yet to ever publicly admit a mistake. (Yes, he did today, after Daschle resigned from the field. But Daschle seems to have truly been the one to make the decision, as did the Deputy Director of OMB.) Besides, how would Obama back out? He’d have to admit that he made the appointment for underhanded reasons.

    Who are the three Republican Cabinet members? Gregg and—? Gates is an independent.

    Besides, what’s the big deal about cross-nominations? Aren’t there any qualified Democrats? Cross-party Cabinet members are pure window dressing.

  • http://www.ssce.net/Web-Articles/Web-articles-indexed-authors.html#authors-l JLenardDetroit

    After all… shouldn’t the “Commerce Secretary” have the most say in a Bill to stimulate COMMERCE?

    I know…. it is just silly of me….