Senate confirms Rice as US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice won easy confirmation to be President George Bush’s new Secretary of State, despite strong dissent from a small group of Democrats who said she shares blame for mistakes and war deaths in Iraq.
The senate voted 85 to 13 to confirm Rice, who succeeds Colin Powell as America’s top diplomat and becomes the first black woman to hold the job.
Plans were made for her to be sworn in at the White House tonight, take her place in the State Department tomorrow and have a more elaborate swearing-in by Bush at the agency on Friday.
The senate vote showed some of the partisanship that delayed Rice’s confirmation vote by several days.
Most of the votes against Rice were Democrats, including some of the senate’s best-known members such as Democratic Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, who was the party’s presidential candidate in last year’s election.
Democratic foes of her appointment focused mostly on the way Bush and Rice took the United States to war in Iraq and how they have handled the war with insurgents since deposing Saddam Hussein.
They said mistakes had led to mounting American casualties. As the debate drew to a close, word came from Iraq of the crash of a US military transport helicopter in bad weather, killing at least 30 people in the worst US loss since the war.
Rice’s nomination was never in doubt, however. Republicans had hoped to hold the vote last week, on the same day that Bush took the oath for his second term, but Democrats asked for more time.
They accused Democrats of inappropriately delaying Rice’s confirmation to make political statements about Iraq policy.
Rice, 50, is Bush’s trusted national security aide and a main architect of his policies on Iraq and the war on terror.
