Business the Postal Service could do without
December 17th, 2008 | Postal Service State | Posted by Tim Kauffman
Update: Fifteen embassies have received envelopes containing white powder, State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood said in a press briefing this morning in Washington.
The embassies are: Berlin; Bern, Switzerland; Brussels, Belgium; Bucharest, Romania; Copenhagen, Denmark; Dublin, Ireland;Â Luxembourg; Madrid, Spain; Oslo, Norway; Paris; Riga, Latvia; Rome; Stockholm, Sweden; Tallinn, Estonia; and The Hague, Netherlands.Â
Tests have come back negative in all cases save for The Hague, where results are still pending. Wood said the department has no information on a possible motive for the mailings.
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Looks like the U.S. Postal Service is busy sending more than just Christmas cards and packages this holiday season. Envelopes containing suspicious white powder have turned up at several U.S. embassies overseas and more than 40 governors’ offices stateside in the past week or so.
The white powder in each of the letters has been field tested and come back negative for any harmful material, the FBI said in a statement released this morning. All of the letters have been postmarked from Texas and are similar in nature, the FBI said. An ABC News report says 11 U.S. embassies in Europe have received the letters.
The FBI and Postal Inspection Service are investigating the case. Meanwhile, the FBI has told governors and the State Department to be on the lookout for additional letters.
Tags: embassies, FBI, letters, Postal Inspection Service
Clinton nomination a Constitutional quandary
November 26th, 2008 | State Transition | Posted by Tim Kauffman
An obscure provision in the U.S. Constitution poses a potential roadblock on Sen. Hillary Clinton’s path to becoming Secretary of State.
It turns out that the Constitution (specifically Article I, Section 6) prohibits a lawmaker from taking any goverment job for which the salary was raised during the lawmaker’s elected term. As the Washington Post and numerous bloggers have noted, this would effectively preclude Clinton from taking the State Department gig. Salaries for Cabinet secretaries have been increased twice since Clinton started her second term as the junior New York senator in January 2007: to $191,300 in January 2008 and to $196,700 this coming January.
But it turns out lawmakers already have devised a way around the sticky Constitutional quandary. They can pass a measure stipulating that Clinton will take the job at the salary that was in place when she began her current term: $186,600. There’s even a name for the workaround: “The Saxbe Fix,” so named after a similar situation in 1973 when President Nixon nominated Ohio Sen. William Saxbe to be his attorney general.
This solution likely would rub strict constitutionalists the wrong way, but look at the upside: By taking the job at a reduced salary, Clinton would be a step ahead of the game in helping her new boss fulfill a campaign pledge to cut government spending.
Tags: Barack Obama, Constitution, Hillary Clinton