Ned Brown | Whither the next US ambassador to Jamaica?

My good friend, (retired) US Ambassador Luis Moreno called recently to ask my advice on how to help two former State Department colleagues get their ambassadorial nominations confirmed by the US Senate. After all, I managed to get Moreno’s confirmation vote scheduled in 2014 when the State Department was unable to do so.

The conversation then turned to President Biden’s nominee, New York Assemblyman Nick Perry, to be the next US ambassador to Jamaica. Luis asked what the timetable looked like for Perry’s confirmation. I chuckled and replied, “Not anytime soon.” I should have instead used the wry Jamaican response, “Soon come!” Allow me to briefly explain the nomination-confirmation process to The Gleaner’s readers. By doing that, let me tell you that exactly nine ambassadors have been confirmed to country posts since February 2021 – Canada, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, Austria, Israel, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and New Zealand – or about one every five weeks.

Here is the process. The president nominates someone to be an ambassador. Next, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has to schedule a nomination hearing with the nominee and the senators on the committee – sort of a job interview if you will. Then the committee has to vote on the nomination. If the nominee passes this hurdle, then the nomination moves to the full Senate for confirmation. Here is where the logjam begins.

There are two types of US ambassadors: career foreign service officers (like Moreno) and political appointees (like Donald Tapia). Political appointees make up about 35-40 per cent of the ambassador corps, and the balance are career officers. Let me deal with the political appointees, like Mr Perry for Jamaica, which are often more problematic. To date, the following nominee for these countries are still awaiting full Senate confirmation: Poland, Belgium, France, Ireland, Costa Rica, China, Japan, and I love this one... tiny Andorra. Maybe they will get through over the next ten months.

Here is the group Nick Perry is in: nominated, but no confirmation hearing scheduled. There are 21 to date, and President Biden will keep adding more to the list. Here is the twofold problem: the Senate Foreign Relations Committee generally hears only one to three nominees per week, and only when they are in session. This week, they will hear two: Italy and Germany. And then the Senate goes out until early January 2022. And it is up to the Committee Chairman, Senator Menendez, who decides who appears and when they appear before his committee. But let’s say that Mr Perry gets lucky and gets his nomination hearing sometime in the spring of 2022.

Now comes the hard part, and what Moreno was up against when I helped him: the Senate has a very tight voting calendar to handle all of its business. Confirmations for political appointees are generally at the bottom of the Senate’s priorities. The Bahamas post went unfilled for all of Trump’s presidency.

Let’s recap. The Senate has yet to vote on the nine ambassadors approved by the committee. Then even if the 21 nominees (Perry’s group) get through the committee, they still need to get on the full Senate voting calendar. And the entire Senate goes out for six weeks starting in August.

One more detail: every unconfirmed ambassador nominee has to be renominated after January 1, 2022. Mr Perry “soon come.”

- Ned Brown is a political adviser and author and worked for the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and commutes to Washington, DC. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.