I have a question for my US friends.
James Holsinger is the nominee on hold for Surgeon General. George Bush nominated him in May, Holsinger appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in July. He is a controversial nominee.
But Holsinger is telling people the president plans to appoint him to the post anyway once the Congress goes into its holiday recess, a well-connected Wilmore source says.
As I understand it:
a) The Senate committee is stalling (the Senate was supposed to vote in September)
b) If the committee and the Senate voted against Holsinger tomorrow ( some committee members made statements of reservation after the hearing)
c) it doesn’t matter what the committee decides, Bush can or will over ride their decision using what is called a recess appointment
d) The current President has made 167 recess appointments
The Surgeon General serves four years.
The acting Surgeon General has been on the job since October 1.
I find it difficult to believe the people of the United States would be well served to have Holsinger in office.
If Bush is permitted to just appoint him, is there any recourse available to legislative bodies to remove him?
Bear with me here, I don’t understand why the Senate is unwilling to stand up to the White House and say Holsinger is not competent for this job, we reject this nominee. Dodd has, Clinton has, Edwards has, Obama has.
via: Bible Belt Blogger
Published 10 months, 4 weeks ago
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Judicial Council Chief James Holsinger and $20 million of UMC Money
by Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D., and Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq.
Dr. James Holsinger, principal of the UMC Judicial Council has been a major player in a contentious and controversial lawsuit involving UMC money. The litigation involved the sale in 1995 of a United Methodist Church (UMC) hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, and the disposition of the $20 million in proceeds. The hospital’s trustees refused to hand over the assets to the owner, the UMC in Kentucky. Instead, the self-appointed trustees, calling themselves the Good Samaritan Foundation (GSF) placed the funds under their sole control and withheld the money from the church for five years. The Kentucky Annual Conference commenced a lawsuit against GSF which then cross-sued the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) bringing them into the case. The two church organizations were forced to engage in a long and costly lawsuit to find out where the money was and to regain its property for the Annual Conference. Holsinger became a GSF trustee in July 2000, joining in the lawsuit against his own church.
According to several individuals intimately acquainted with the litigation, Holsinger actually became the driving force in the prolongation of the lawsuit. Shortly after GSF lost in court for the second time in 2006, Holsinger stated that the GSF trustees, which he chaired, would persist in its legal battle. In a stunning denunciation of his own church, Holsinger publicly stated his personal belief that the UMC was “only interested in the Foundation’s money, not its cause” [health care for the poor and disadvantaged]. It was only when Holsinger was named as Surgeon General that the litigation came to an abrupt halt. Within a matter of days after his May 24, 2007, nomination, Holsinger resigned from the GSF trustees and the lawsuit, indicating that to continue would be incompatible with an appointment as Surgeon General. Within a mere two weeks, the suit was finally settled — after over seven years!
What might have motivated Holsinger to be a part of long, costly litigation against his own church? Following the money offers insight. From July 1997, through June 2006, the GSF and a corporate subsidiary dispersed $8,430,363 in grants — of which $5,314,670 (63 percent) was given to University of Kentucky (UK) programs in medicine, nursing, dentistry, and public health. This included endowing two academic chairs valued at a million dollars each — one in nursing and the other in public health. These endowed chairs and several million in other gifts were awarded while Holsinger was fundraising for these UK programs in his job as Chancellor of the Chandler Medical Center of UK from 1994 through 2003. The grants continued to flow after he left the position of Chancellor, while he continued as a GSF trustee until May 2007.
The GSF’s contributions to UK medical and its related schools have been so significant that the foundation is listed on the highest tier of honored benefactors to the university, along with major corporations such as Alcoa, DuPont, IBM, and the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company.
What makes the GSF awards to UK more remarkable is that they were awarded in contradiction to the foundation’s own standards of grant-making. According to the grant policy guidelines of the GSF, “[m]ajor organizations” such as “[h]ospitals, [c]olleges and [u]niversities are not eligible as a general statement,” although exceptions could be made by the trustees. The exception in this case became the rule when it came to UK.
In addition, for more than a decade the return on the investments of the foundation was dismal. In May, 2005, GSF admitted in a letter to making poor return on the assets and to conflicts of interest by some of the trustees. Three GSF trustees had been involved in managing the assets of GSF while serving on the board. The church representatives told the GSF that it was “unconscionable” that after a decade the funds were not being professionally managed by experts who had no personal connection with the board.
Did Holsinger ever inform his fellow members of the Judicial Council that he was involved in a lawsuit with the Kentucky Annual Conference and GBGM? Even more to the point, we are told by persons attending the 2004 General Conference that he did not disclose to the Conference his involvement in the lawsuit and his potential for conflicts of interest with the Kentucky Conference and GBGM if elected.
Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D., is a United Methodist minister and research psychologist who has written extensively on the role of clergy in preventive mental health care. He lives in New York City. He has co-authored 14 books including: Counseling Survivors of Traumatic Events (Abingdon, 2003), Reflections on Grief and the Spiritual Journey (Abingdon, 2005), Counseling Persons with Addictions and Compulsions (Pilgrim, 2007), and Connected Spirits: Friends and Spiritual Journeys (Pilgrim, 2007).
Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq., is an attorney practicing law in New York City with specialties in real estate, trusts and estates, and not-for-profit organizations. He has represented many United Methodist churches and organizations and is the Chancellor of the New York Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Any views stated in this article are personal and are not intended to represent the views of any client.
Thank you Dr. Weaver. I read your article when it first came out and have great respect for your investigative thoroughness and clarity.
The GSF and it’s fight against the UMC needs to be known by as many as possible.
Holsinger’s involvement speaks to character and self interest, not other interest that people need and expect in a SG.
Holsingers years in bed with the IRD and its board may be of concern to every thinking believer, no matter what political label they claim.
His time in administration in the VA can be looked at carefully by every American who cares about basic and competent health care.
His resignation from Ashbury was met by fellow board members with unsurprisingly sterile acceptance. The seminary has been ripped apart this past year, and it is not known if he served ethically with the best interests of the students, staff and school in mind.
His decision to step aside on a recent Methodist judicial review was pure political expediency and well documented - self serving but stepping aside finally good for the denomination.
His medical ‘paper’ got the media attention, and no matter what one thinks or feels about GLBT, was throughly medically shoddy when it was written as much as it is today.
This cardiologist professors record does not warrant the faith of the American public.
I’ll address the recess appointment question for now and hold off on the merits of Holsinger’s nomination.
A recess appointment only lasts until the next Congress is sworn in, which would be early January, 2009. At that point, the new congress and the incoming President, who’d be taking office a few weeks later (Congress starts the first week of January while the new president is sworn in on the 20th) would likely choose a long-term successor.
Can Congress get rid of a recess appointee? Only via the House impeaching him and the Senate voting to expel him; the Senate vote needs to be a two-thirds majority (67 of 100), so at least 16 Republicans senators would have to join the 49 Democrats and two Democratic-caucusing independents to oust a recess appointee.
There would have to be more than what’s on the table for that amount of defections to take place.
Thanks Mark, I appreciate your explanation.
We may perhaps disagree on Holsinger’s qualification, I figured the stall is partisan because no matter what legislators do, they won’t defy the WH and garner the votes necessary.
To the rest of the world the US Surgeon General represents your health care policy. This guy is a joke, there are thousands of qualified doctors far more qualified on all kinds of levels to oversee a department of 44 thousand hard working people.
I remember Koop getting a hard time, got in and when push came to shove he put his medical ethics over his conservative religious views.
It was his conservative religious buddies that made his time in office and after his term difficult.
If the people of the US are going to get stuck with Holsinger, hopefully the same thing will happen. I see nothing in his behavior indicates he’d place medical ethics over partisanship and neo-conservative evangelicalism. Since you’ll be stuck with him, til 2009 maybe he won’t have time to do to much damage.
Koop was an interesting character. When he was first nominated, his pro-life stand got a lot of flak from the left. Later on, his pro-safe-sex stances got him flak from the right; however, in all of those cases, he was looking out over people’s heath, including the health of the unborn.
Generally, the Surgeon General is a largely apolitical position. Most SGs serve without getting a lot of attention as public-health professionals. Holsinger will probably do OK for the next year-plus.
I mentioned in a previous comment that I have a Sullivan U colleague who worked under Holsinger at the Univ. of Kentucky and vouches for him; she’s fairly liberal and wouldn’t be backing him just to give Dubya a break. I think he’ll do OK until the next president and the next Congress gets to pick a long-term replacement.
Yeah, well, Holsinger didn’t seem to think procedure applied to him.
He didn’t bother responding to follow up requested by the Senate confirmation committe, maybe he’s known all along Bush was going to do a recess appointment. Senator Kennedy:
“We sent out the questions on 7/26 and requested that they be returned by COB on 8/10. We have not received the answers and there is no Committee action scheduled at this time.”
Even staunch Republicans havespoke out against Holsingers positions (or lack of) ie: stem cell research. So much for respect for the Senate and the people he’ll represent.
The Senate leadership is going to keep the Senate in session over the Thanksgiving break (by having a few Senators stick around to open the proceedings, and then do nothing else) to block a recess appointment.
If Bush makes a recess appointment, then they are stuck with him until someone else is appointed - who’d have to be put forward by the president - and it could take some time to get rid of the recess appointee.