Home > A Disastrous Appointment
By Michelle Goldberg
Bush’s backdoor choice of unqualified right-winger
Ellen Sauerbrey to head the US refugee-response team
raises the specter of Michael Brown.
One of the Bush administration’s favorite ways of
rewarding its Christian right base is to seed the
foreign policy bureaucracy with its allies. Because
appointments to international delegations or deputy-
level State Department posts get little mainstream
attention, there wasn’t much uproar when Bush made
Christian radio host Janet Parshall (host of the
hagiographic documentary "George W. Bush: Faith in the
White House") a US delegate to the 2005 United Nations
conference on women. Only a whimper was heard when Bush
tapped Paul Bonicelli, former dean of academic affairs
at the fundamentalist Patrick Henry College, to be
deputy assistant administrator at the United States
Agency for International Development, putting him in
charge of many of America’s programs for promoting
democracy in the Middle East.
But Bush couldn’t slip his nomination for assistant
secretary of state for population, refugees and
migration under the radar. It’s too important a
position. With a $700 million annual budget, the
department formulates America’s response to refugee
crises all over the world. So in October 2005, when
Bush picked Ellen Sauerbrey, right-wing social
conservative with little background in international
affairs, to replace Arthur ("Gene") Dewey, a career
foreign policy official, newspapers all over the
country - including the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the San Antonio Express-News, the Miami Herald
and the Charlton Gazette - came out against her. During
her October Senate hearings, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.,
said, "It doesn’t appear that you have very specific
experience." Given Sauerbrey’s weak résumé for the
position, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., convinced the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee to put off a vote on
her nomination until after the winter break. At the
time, there seemed a slim possibility that the
appointment would be defeated.
Rather than fight it out on Capitol Hill, Bush chose to
circumvent the confirmation process. Yesterday, with
Congress out of session, the president made more than a
dozen recess appointments, granting positions to
several controversial nominees. Julie L. Myers was made
head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau
at the Department of Homeland Security, despite
criticism by Democrats and Republicans that she lacks
experience. Tracy A. Henke became executive director of
the Office of State and Local Government Coordination
and Preparedness; as the Washington Post reported, "She
had been accused in her politically appointed post at
the Justice Department of demanding that information
about racial disparities in police treatment of blacks
in traffic cases be deleted from a news release."
Sauerbrey was installed at the State Department.
She is already being compared to Michael Brown, the
hapless former head of FEMA who famously worried about
his on-camera wardrobe while New Orleans drowned. "If
she is confirmed by the Senate, think of her as the
Michael D. Brown of the refugee world," opined the
Washington Post. Her lack of qualifications are so
glaring that two of the last three people to hold the
position - Democrat Phyllis E. Oakley and Republican
Julia Taft, both of whom served under Clinton - signed
a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
opposing her confirmation.
"Her job description is to help coordinate humanitarian
assistance across the globe, but it’s clear that her
first concern will always be to appease America’s
extreme right," Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., tells
Salon in an e-mail. "There’s a reason the president had
to sneak this appointment past the Senate. I am sure
when her appointment ends in a year, the president will
proclaim that she did a ’heckuva job,’ just like he
told Michael Brown, but I fear that the world community
will be telling a different story."
The comparison to Brown may be misleading, though, as
Sauerbrey will have to deal with significantly more
complex crises involving wars and disasters all over
the world. Oakley, who held the position from 1993 to
1997, describes some of her responsibilities. "We had,
of course, Rwanda and continuing problems in the
Balkans, plus Haiti, plus Cuban refugees," she says.
"It really does depend upon the world situation."
Oakley speculates on some of the challenges Sauerbrey
might face. "I don’t have a crystal ball but there are
things like the tsunami, and natural disasters are
always there. Watching the news today in Iraq, with
problems in the Middle East, the illness of Ariel
Sharon, instability in Lebanon, in Syria, one can just
imagine that there could be big refugee outflows again.
In Africa as well. You just have to expect that there’s
going to be serious humanitarian problems that the US
is going to have to deal with."
Previous assistant secretaries, Oakley stresses, have
had decades of experience. "Gene Dewey, Julia Taft and
I have all had different experiences but we had seen
how U.N. organizations - the mix of NGOs and
governments - work," Oakley says. "I’ve been a foreign
service officer dealing with Afghanistan, and served
for a year as the principal deputy assistant secretary
under Warren Zimmerman, the former ambassador to
Yugoslavia. We knew, all three of us, how to get things
done, the people to call at the Pentagon, what you
needed to do at the National Security Council. You
don’t have time to consult widely. You’ve got to know
the background, what’s possible and how to get things
done quickly." Sauerbrey, Oakley says, "doesn’t have
any of that."
What she does have are friends in the GOP. A darling of
the religious right, Sauerbrey lost two races for the
Maryland governorship and went on to become a TV talk
show host and Maryland chairman of Bush’s 2000
presidential campaign. She had no international
experience until Bush appointed her US ambassador to
the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. There, she
was notorious for her active opposition to programs
that expand women’s access to contraception. She
infuriated representatives of other countries by
working to scuttle international agreements that codify
women’s right to reproductive healthcare. In March, she
was loudly booed by delegates at a U.N. women’s
conference in New York - a rare occurrence - for her
comments endorsing abstinence education as the best way
to fight HIV.
In the past, Sauerbrey has made no secret of her
opposition to reproductive freedom. She began a
November 2003 address to the right-wing group United
Families International by saying, "I always feel when
I’m being introduced as a representative of the United
Nations that I have to say I’m a conservative; I’m not
a feminist." She continued, "Sean Hannity, this
morning, talked about visions and the differences in
visions. My perception is that this prevailing vision
at the U.N. is one that is based on rights, but rights
without responsibility. Family, whatever you want it to
be. Sexual freedom, anything goes. Practically every
resolution that goes before the U.N. ... somebody tries
to figure out a way to put in ’reproductive services.’"
As she spoke, it became clear that her objection to
"reproductive services" encompasses far more than just
opposition to abortion. "So, what is our vision? It is
certainly recognition that government policies have to
be supported with the family," she said. She added that
"we have to look at ourselves and recognize that
government tax policies, government welfare policies
.. no-fault divorce, [and] sex education have not been
healthy to the promotion of the family."
Sauerbrey’s opposition to sex education and safe sex
initiatives will likely have profound effects on
America’s refugee policies. "The first issue is whether
she is fully supportive of family planning efforts for
refugee women, including things like emergency
contraception, which has been unbelievably
controversial in this administration," says Jodi
Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Health
and Gender Equity, an NGO focused on international
reproductive rights. "In refugee settings, 80 percent
of refugees are women and children. There are extremely
high rates of sexual violence and coercion in refugee
settings. You have a really, really high need for
effective reproductive and sexual health programs that
would include access to emergency contraception and HIV
prophylactics and that kind of thing."
With Sauerbrey, Jacobson says, "You have a person in
there who A) doesn’t have any experience dealing with
refugee movements, refugee resettlement, refugee
crises, and B) has an ideological agenda against the
single most important health intervention for refugee
women."
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/01/05/sauerbrey/index_np.html