Helms is losing solid GOP support for blocking Weld hearings

Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is doing the right thing in supporting a hearing to consider the president’s nomination of former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld as ambassador to Mexico.

Lugar has said he will defy committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.); another committee Republican, Gordon Smith of Oregon, has said he supports a hearing for Weld but has not decided a course of action.

None of this guarantees that Helms will call for a hearing. But if Smith does join Lugar, those two GOP votes plus the committee’s Democratic votes will create a new majority. The pressure on the chairman is growing.

Asking the right questions and listening to the answers are the only reasonable means of measuring the qualifications of a certain person for a certain job. This nomination is subject to confirmation by the Senate, not by a single senator. No one should hold the confirmation process hostage to a whim.

It may be that Weld would not persuade the committee that he’s the best choice to be ambassador to Mexico. But Lugar is right when he points out that “procedurally [the senators] have the right to hear him.” Lugar knows what he’s talking about. For years he was the committee’s top Republican.

Even if the committee votes to force a hearing, there are other blocking actions that Helms could take. The positive option would be for Helms to bow to the bipartisan pressure and schedule hearings. Otherwise, Republicans still raw from an unsuccessful attempt to oust their House speaker might face another unattractive, divisive battle.

The politics swirling around this controversy have all but obscured what started it: President Clinton’s nomination of a moderate Republican with ample credentials to be ambassador to Mexico, a neighbor with a complex and important relationship to the United States. That nomination is worth the committee’s consideration.