Wrecking Crew at Work

The last time anybody noticed, President Reagan was a registered Republican. He was reelected President on the same day that the American people returned a Republican majority to the Senate. By law and custom, the President is entitled to appoint senior officials of his own choosing, subject only to the advice and consent of the Senate.

All this being so, there is something bizarre about the long and so-far-successful efforts by Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and eight Republican colleagues to block a Senate vote on 30 diplomatic nominees.

Thomas Pickering, named by Reagan to be ambassador to Israel, is one of those whose nominations are being held up. Another is Richard Burt, assistant secretary of state for European affairs who is to become ambassador to West Germany.

Senators have a constitutional right to vote against the confirmation of nominees whom they consider unqualified or unsuitable for their prospective posts. If enough senators vote no, that’s that--the President must send up another name.

But that isn’t what has been happening. The Helms wrecking crew doesn’t have the votes to kill Reagan’s diplomatic appointments; the strategy has been to stall action until a weary President finally gives in to ideological blackmail and withdraws the names. Fortunately, Reagan shows no signs of doing so.

Some of the nominations have been pending for months as Helms used--or rather abused--traditional senatorial courtesy to put them on indefinite hold. When the nominations finally reached the Senate floor last week, Helms and his friends used still more delaying tactics to postpone action until at least next week.

Helms and his friends claim that Secretary of State George P. Shultz is trying to purge conservative political appointees from the diplomatic corps and replace them with career diplomats who are soft on communism, et cetera, ad nauseam. Somehow we doubt that Reagan or his secretary of state has been taken over by dangerous liberals.

What Helms really wants to do is force the Administration to turn the diplomatic corps over to folks who look at the world through his eyes.

This was reflected in testimony from David R. Funderburk, a Helms protege who until recently served as the ambassador to Romania. He opposed Burt’s nomination on the ground that he has carried out a policy of “concessions, compromise, conciliation and capitulation.” He charged, by way of illustration, that Burt “helped prop up Communist tyrants” by arranging visits to Communist countries by Administration officials.

Helms would like to have people with the Funderburk mentality running American embassies all over the world. Given a chance to vote on the matter, the Senate, we are confident, will demonstrate that it thinks otherwise.