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This is not about the porkulus bill but still significant. Much has been said about candidate Obama’s promises and delivery of same as President. A recurring theme is recruiting lobbyists for his administration. William J Lynn is no exception. A registered lobbyist until July and Senior Vice President of Government Operations and Strategy for Raytheon he was nominated and confirmed as Deputy Secretary of Defense this week.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) voiced opposition on Obama’s selection. On his first day in office, Obama issued an executive order forcing individuals to wait two years before they could be hired for the agencies they had lobbied and to remove themselves from involvement in issues related to their former employers.

“Obviously the American people were promised one thing but delivered another,” said McCain, Obama’s opponent in the presidential election.

Grassley’s comments included mention of Lynn being yet another Obama pick from the former Clinton Administration. On Lynn’s time as comptroller at the Pentagon Grassley said the following: As chief financial officer, Lynn “advocated very questionable accounting practices that were obviously not in the public interest,” Grassley told his colleagues on the Senate floor.

Lynn’s lame expression of how and when he would recuse himself from ‘banned’ actiivties, as if being there wasn’t one of them, is compounded by the fact that McCain opposed this nomination but voted for Lynn anyway. At least Grassley voted against the confirmation as did three others.

You could say it does not matter how Senators vote after the 1/2 majority is reached for it does not affect the outcome. But there is the nagging obstacle with that argument called principle. You could say casting a vote for other reasons is a political necessity or reality but the same problem exists regarding principle. Sort of ironic to be discussing principle when the President promised no lobbyists would not be allowed, then changed his mind on the specifics and then his former campaign opponent expresses concern on the topic but votes in favor of a lobbyist confirmation anyhow.

The only part of Washington politics and hope and change from Obama and others is Washington still works the same way and they hope you won’t notice they did not change anything as promised in this regard. However a change in this republic to socialism is a stronger possibility no matter how often anyone dismisses the claim.

The roll call vote is of course listed below.

Stanford Matthews
MoreWhat.com

U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 111^th Congress - 1^st Session

as compiled through Senate LIS by the Senate Bill Clerk under the direction of the Secretary of the Senate

Vote Summary

Grouped By Vote Position
YEAs —93

NAYs —4

Not Voting - 2

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 5:02 am and is filed under Public Affairs, wordpress, Politics, McCain, GOP, Democrats, lobbyist, disclosure, ethics, oversight, obama, Grassley, Congress, Military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.