An interesting announcement flashed on the White House News Page Thursday, and since it was clustered among a number of other announcements, it might have been missed.
If you scan down the list to the very bottom, you will find "Nominations and Withdrawals Sent to the Senate" and clicking it brings you to two nominations and once withdrawal. The first nomination, Kristen Silverberg of Texas, is to be the US Ambassador to the EU. Not significant until you make it to the bottom, and there you find the one withdrawal, C. Boyden Gray, who was the nominee-apparent.
If you do not know who C. Boyden Gray is, he is one of the masterminds behind the unitary executive, working in the first Bush administration to protect executive power against the intrusions from the Democratic Congress. It was Gray who orchestrated the creation of an alternative legislative history to the Civil Rights Act Amendments of 1991 so when his boss signed the bill, he would not have to accept a number of Democratic provisions that earlier had been vetoed.
Gray has been a thorn in the side of Democrats since the Reagan administration, where each Republican administration after Reagan tucked him safely inside the White House to keep immune from the Senate confirmation process. Even in this Bush administration, Gray initially served as a senior adviser to the president in the early days of the administration. But in 2005, President Bush administration sent Gray's nomination to be the Ambassador to the EU to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 2005, but since the confirmation was stalled, President Bush recessed Gray in December 2006. The administration then had to bite the bullet and resubmit Gray's nomination to the Senate after the 109th Congress ran out of time. Only this time, of course, the Senate would be in the hands of the Democrats, which leads us to the withdrawal of the nomination and in Gray's place Ms. Silverberg, who has already been confirmed for a different position in the State Department and who I assume the administration sees as their best bet.
What is interesting is the lack of volume on either side of the political fence--the administration who jumped circles complaining about up and down votes, and the Democrats who use any chance to charge the administration with imperial motives. It might have been that Gray asked to have his nomination withdrawn, but that does not seem likely since he was given extra duties less than two months ago.
