This Woman's Quiet Death Epitomizes America's Broken Political System

Cassandra Butts died of leukemia on May 25, 2016, 27 years after she met fellow Harvard Law student Barack Obama and struck up a friendship that would change her life. She was close friends with Obama, working with him on his 2004 US Senate campaign and on his 2008 presidential campaign, before joining his White House team as deputy counsel.

Butts was also an international diplomat who served as an observer in the 2000 Zimbabwean parliamentary election. In 2014, Obama nominated her to be the ambassador to the Bahamas. But she was never confirmed. Butts spent the last 820 days of her life waiting for a confirmation that never came.

What happened? Norm Ornstein, political scientist and resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, says, "Here you have a person who is, by every standard, extraordinarily qualified and talented, a terrific representative for the United States. And yet she had to sit twisting in the wind for an extraordinary period of time, for no reason whatsoever, nothing that had anything to do with her qualifications, with moral turpitude, with scandal of any sort, but just to keep Obama from getting his nominees in place."

Cassandra Butts's story illustrates the depth of Republican congressional obstruction during Obama's presidency. You cannot truly understand the Obama era without understanding that the GOP has used its legislative power to mount attacks on the president. The party has tried to make government grind to a halt. Sometimes the Republicans have shut it down altogether. They have tried to stop the president from being able to do anything. That includes halting legislation, refusing to approve judges to the Supreme Court, and other crucial federal seats, delaying key appointments like the director of the ATF for years, and ignoring the nominations of ambassadors to popular vacation destinations.

It's not that they are opposing anything on ideological grounds; it's that they're trying to keep government from functioning so that they can say, "See! Obama cannot govern! He cannot accomplish anything! The problem is him!" "It's a conscious effort to undermine government," Ornstein says. Throughout the Obama administration Republicans have tried to delegitimize the president and his actions and his people. It's true that politics ain't beanbag, but when you reach the point where you're undermining the entire foundation of the system, that's really regrettable."

Part of the privilege of being president is getting to name foreign ambassadors. At the same time, it's the right of every senator to place an indefinite hold on any nomination. That said, in matters of ambassadorial nominations, it's the Senate's job to advise and consent. Senators are not supposed to use the ambassadorial nomination process as part of a war on the president.

"When it comes to appointments, you're only supposed to make sure that it's nothing egregious," says Erika Knuti, former communications director for Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat. "You're making sure that there's no one who is highly unqualified. It's a check on patronage. Not to be used to block further legislation." But in the modern GOP, that's how they roll.

Ornstein says, "The way the nomination confirmation process works and has for a long time is any individual senator can hold a nominee for any purpose. A lot of times it's done in a hostage-taking way. Sometimes the ransom can be getting a bill released or getting money to your district or state. Other times it's personal animus toward the president for no good reason at all. This time part of it had to be personal animus toward President Obama. Something Senator [Tom] Cotton [of Arkansas] has in abundance. You gotta believe that watching a friend of yours be unable to complete her mission or achieve this goal just because somebody has it in for you just makes the terrible nature of the system worse."

Butts's nomination process was stopped at first by Senator Ted Cruz, who placed a hold on all of the president's nominees for State Department positions. It was a way for him to retaliate for the Iran nuclear pact that Obama negotiated. What does the Iran deal have to do with the ambassador to the Bahamas? Nothing.

Now some might say this is not a big deal if we don't have an ambassador to the Bahamas for a few years. It's certainly not like they're ever going to attack us.

"Ambassadors are there to represent Americans abroad," says Knuti, whose parents worked in the State Department and who spent years living in Russia. "Americans live all over this world and just because you're not on American soil doesn't mean your government stops serving you. These ambassadorships are part of our functioning government. When you're blocking a job from being filled, you're now essentially shutting down a core function of the government that is to have representatives from America in these countries to represent American interests. It's not just a political war. It's 'I'm going to take my trucks and go home.' It's more than just fighting; it's not doing your job. It's almost worse than not doing your job."

If the Butts's story was merely about her getting caught up in a wide net of holds that would be bad enough, but, as Ornstein said, part of this is about a deep-seated animus toward Obama. Cotton is known for his anger toward the president. He's the senator who spearheaded the open letter to the leaders of Iran sent by 47 Republican senators meant to publicly disrespect the president—they were essentially going over his head and talking directly to the leader of another nation. They also hoped to somehow scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran that was then being negotiated.

Cotton placed a hold on Butts's nomination and on the nominations of potential ambassadors to Sweden and Norway. Cotton ended up releasing the holds on the ambassadors to Sweden and Norway, but not on Butts. According to Frank Bruni of the New York Times, Cotton once told Butts why he was blocking her nomination.

"[H]e explained that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama's—the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates—and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president. Cotton's spokeswoman did not dispute Butts's characterization of that meeting, and stressed, in separate emails, that Cotton had enormous respect for her and her career."

You can see the sort of bloodsport that DC politics has become. And is largely driven by the modern Republican Party. This is not a both-sides-do-it phenomenon, and to say it is is part of the problem. The Republican Party is, as Ornstein writes in his political science classic It's Even Worse Than It Looks, "ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition… all but declaring war on the government."

Obstruction is a core part of the modern Republican toolbox. Has it worked? Every political expert I spoke with said no. Political science professor Jason Johnson says, "At the end of the day, none of this gets Republicans what they want. They don't have anything to show for it. They haven't gotten Obama out of office. They haven't tanked his approval ratings. This behavior doesn't really hurt Obama; it just hurts the country. Blocking one appointment is fine, that's statecraft. But when you see dozens and dozens of examples of this, it creates a tsunami of dysfunction. They're creating the dysfunctional government that they're complaining about."

Obstruction has failed the Republican Party in more ways than one. It was meant to ensure that the Obama government appeared dysfunctional and broken and prove the argument that Obama is ineffectual, weak, and unable to reach across the aisle. It was also meant to underline the modern Republican thesis that government itself is the problem.

But years of hearing that government is the problem, and seeing their elected officials get nothing done, led Republican voters to think, if politicians are the problem then why vote for a politician when you could choose a non-politician like… Donald Trump. "What you've done," Ornstein says, "is convince the largest group of Americans, including your own partisans, that you're all a bunch of idiots and what that resulted in is Donald Trump. Trump is a self-inflicted wound by a group of people who enraged their own constituents and convinced them that anybody could run government better than they have."

It looks like obstruction ended up obstructing the Republican Party from rational thought. And now it has a nominee who could destroy the party as we know it.

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