Who’s Borking Sung Kim?

So months after Chris Hill protege Sung Kim was nominated to be our Ambassador to South Korea, I’d assumed that he must have been confirmed in the dark of some night when I was too busy to read my news aggregators. Not so:

The official confirmation for the next U.S. ambassador to South Korea designate, Sung Kim, is unexpectedly being delayed although it seemed a mere formality. Apparently some senators are stalling because they worry about the direction of the Obama administration’s North Korea policy, but who they are is not known.

Kim’s nomination was supposed to be wrapped up before Congress adjourned for the summer early this month so he could be posted at the end of the month. A senate confirmation hearing late last month also went smoothly and took no more than half an hour. But in its last meeting before the adjournment, the Senate only confirmed the nomination of David Shear as ambassador to Vietnam, but not Kim. [Chosun Ilbo]

It seems that one Republican Senator is holding up the nomination to extract policy concessions from the Administration over North Korea policy, and specifically, food aid. As to who the Senator in question is, your guess is as good as mine, and possibly better.

One source said, “The Korean Embassy in Washington is asking around trying to find out the cause of the delay, but even the State Department apparently said it doesn’t know.” The prevailing theory is that Republicans who take a hardline view of North Korea are holding up the process to ensure that the Obama administration does not repeat the mistakes of former president George W. Bush, who drastically softened his stance toward the North during his later years in office but achieved nothing.

This is a tactic that the Republicans used with mixed success before. The nominations of Kathleen Stephens, Chris Hill, and Kurt Campbell were all held up for varying periods of time by former Senator Sam Brownback. Brownback eventually dropped his holds on the Stephens and Campbell nominations for policy concessions. In Stephen’s case, Chris Hill broke the promise after Stephens was confirmed. In Campbell’s case, lifting the hold may have been for the best. Campbell has generally been a voice of reason and an advocate of attaching negative consequences to Kim Jong Il’s aggressive behavior. Hill was confirmed over Brownback’s metaphorical dead body — meaning, a filibuster and a cloture vote — only to leave office as U.S. Ambassor to Iraq after just a year in office.

Anyway, one person they can’t pin this on is Sam Brownback.

Another person they can’t pin this on is me. I had nothing to do with any of this. Not directly, anyway. At least, not this time. But still, you can’t deny that getting profiled on OFK seems does have an inverse relationship to the speed of a Senate confirmation, no?