WASHINGTON – Once again, President Bush may have misjudged the extent of GOP resistance to one of his decisions. His nomination of a four-star general to serve as CIA director has drawn complaints from Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike.
The administration’s shake-up, under way since late March, was expected to improve White House dealings with Congress. Yet Bush’s selection of Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden to head the troubled spy agency, three days after he announced the resignation of Porter Goss, seems to have caught some top Republicans by surprise.
And grumbling in some GOP quarters seemed likely to persist, fueled in part by Republican concern over Bush’s declining approval ratings.
Those ratings – at 33 percent in a recent AP-Ipsos poll, the lowest of his presidency – have emboldened Republicans to speak out when they don’t agree with the president, something that didn’t happen during Bush’s first term.
Congressional Republicans have been battered by a string of White House woes.
These include the fumbled handling of Hurricane Katrina; unhappiness about Iraq; opposition to the now-abandoned Dubai ports deal; the failed nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court; Bush’s inability to achieve the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, an overhaul of Social Security; and the uproar over a secret eavesdropping program in the war on terrorism.
The fact that Hayden oversaw the surveillance program as director of the National Security Agency only keeps the controversy alive, with questions over it likely to figure prominently at his Senate confirmation hearings. He headed the NSA from 1999-2005.
“If he interprets the law as he appears to be interpreting it, I think it’s bad for the country to have the chief of intelligence having telephones in the United States monitored without somebody else approving it,” said retired Adm. Stansfield Turner, who was CIA chief during the Carter administration.
Otherwise, Turner characterized Hayden as “very qualified and very capable” and said he personally has no problems with giving the civilian job to an active military officer.
Turner was an admiral when he headed the CIA, a fact administration officials pointed to on Monday in defense of Bush’s choice.
Still, with public support for the war in Iraq eroding and the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld moving more and more into intelligence-gathering activities, the naming of an active four-star general raised concerns in Congress and with civil-liberties groups.
The criticism of Bush’s CIA choice, at least initially, did not appear deep enough to put Hayden’s confirmation chances in serious jeopardy. But it seemed certain to yield contentious confirmation hearings – and likely to widen the rift between the White House and some members of his own party on Capitol Hill.
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