An Almost Ambassador Encounters a Congressional Dead End By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
For most of her 53 years, starting in childhood playing basketball against boys, the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook has had the habit of defying barriers. It served her well starting college at age 16. It fortified her in becoming a television news producer as a young black woman. And it proved especially necessary when, in her mid-20s, she felt called to ministry.
Seeking ordination in the African-American church, Ms. Cook was prying open the gates of an institution heavily female in the pews but almost entirely male in the pulpit. The only congregation to take her as a pastor was a nearby moribund church in Manhattan’s Chinatown, not exactly a hotbed of black Baptists.
Yet after she built up her congregation there at the Mariners’ Temple, and founded subsequent churches in the Bronx, and along the way served as a domestic-policy fellow in the Clinton administration, she rose to the closest thing black Christianity has to a chief executive: president of the Hampton Ministers Conference, an umbrella group of 7,500 clergy members from the various African-American denominations.
Then, last month, the arc of Ms. Cook’s career drastically plunged. The woman who had thrived against basketball elbows, macho newsrooms and sexist churchmen ran into the strange ways of the United States Congress. Without public debate or a formal vote, her nomination to be the Obama administration’s special ambassador for international religious liberty quietly and cryptically died.
She was the nominee of a Democratic president, needing only the approval of a Democratic majority in the Senate. In the Foreign Relations Committee, the first step in her confirmation, Democrats held an 11-8 advantage and the ranking Republican, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, supported her.
But by the means of a single senator’s use of a privilege known as a hold-over letter, the committee was forced to delay its vote on her in December, meaning that the Congressional session ended and the nomination expired. It remains unclear whether the Obama administration will put her up again in the current session or try someone else. Ms. Cook has declined to speak to the media.
What one might call the Case of the Almost Ambassador has several strands, variously involving the way she was presented, the reasons she was opposed, and the peculiar mores of the Senate. What they add up to is a significant diplomatic position — one created by an act of Congress in 1998 — remaining vacant halfway through the president’s term and a specifically religious example of partisan gridlock in Washington.
“Her nomination has been stalled by the same type of general obstructionism that often paralyzed the last Congress,” said Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, Ms. Cook’s most vigorous backer on the Foreign Relations Committee. “I hope any senator who is blocking her nomination will take the time to meet with her and give her the opportunity to detail why she is the right person for this important job.”
That person would be Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, a conservative Republican closely allied with the Tea Party movement. By various inside accounts, which were not disputed by the senator’s staff, he was the person who filed the hold-over letter. He also canceled a personal meeting with Ms. Cook in mid-December that could conceivably have unfrozen her nomination.
Wesley Denton, a spokesman, said Senator DeMint had “concerns” about Ms. Cook’s “lack of international diplomacy qualifications.” The senator also objected to Democrats’ trying to schedule a vote after only a “truncated hearing” on Nov. 17, Mr. Denton said.
A spokesman for the Foreign Relations Committee, Frederick Jones, said that the Cook nomination was not advanced hastily.
In fact, he added, the other three nominees who appeared in the Nov. 17 hearing were approved by the committee.
Somewhere between the Gillibrand and DeMint versions of what happened reside a few relevant truths about the nomination fiasco.
In the aftermath of Ms. Cook’s nomination on June 15, several journalists, religion scholars and former State Department officials did raise concerns about her lack of diplomatic experience. They contrasted her resume to that of two previous ambassadors, Robert A. Seiple and John V. Hanford, who had worked full-time in the fields of Christian relief and religious liberty.
The legitimate questions about Ms. Cook’s background, though, quickly gave way to a condescending caricature of her as a “motivational speaker.” Various articles quoted the same phrase from a New York Times profile of Ms. Cook in 2002 as “Billy Graham and Oprah rolled all into one.”
Like many major pastors, Ms. Cook has written motivational books and given motivational sermons. What her detractors — and, more surprisingly, many of her proponents — failed to point out was how much else she brought to the ambassadorial table.
She is fluent in Spanish. She lived two summers in Ghana and Nigeria, working on faith-based development projects. Her prominence in black Christianity, particularly as president of the Hampton conference, put her on a first-name basis with religious leaders domestically and abroad. As a woman who had struggled against gender bias in her own clerical career, she was well-suited to taking on issues of religious persecution against women. Her experience in television production suggested a talent for public diplomacy.
And if the crux of the nomination decision was Ms. Cook’s diplomatic experience, or lack thereof, then one might have expected the skeptics on the Foreign Relations Committee to have raised that question. They never did.
When Senator DeMint submitted two sets of written questions to Ms. Cook, he asked about many other key issues — Christians in Iraq, Shariah law in Muslim countries, the French ban on the burqa and hijab — and received answers to each. He did not devote a single question to the matter of Ms. Cook’s international experience.
With Senator DeMint’s hold-over letter and the end of the last Congressional session, neither a public discussion nor a public vote will ever take place on Ms. Cook. Her nomination has gone from limbo to obsolescence. And accomplishing that took only one well-timed, confidential letter from one senator on a committee of 19.E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu
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