Sen. Tom Cotton once told Cassandra Butts that he was blocking her nomination to be an ambassador

[marble falls]

7. The entire Frank Bruni/NYT OpEd can be read here ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/opinion/an-obama-nominees-crushed-hopes.html

Another excerpt:

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When Butts died on May 25 — she had acute leukemia, but didn’t know it and hadn’t felt ill until just beforehand — the Bahamas had gone without an ambassador for 1,647 days.

“All Cassandra wanted to do was serve her country,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, told me. “Looking back, it is devastating to think that through no fault of her own, she spent the last 835 days of her life waiting for confirmation.”

Maybe the Bahamas, Norway and Sweden aren’t pivotal to us. But we have relations with each. We have ambassadors — or mean to. How do we guarantee the country’s security and get its business effectively done when the Senate shows such disregard for that? How do we look on the world stage?

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With her Harvard degree and, later, her connection to Obama, she could have turned to the private sector and really cashed in. That wasn’t her way. She worked for various Democratic office holders on Capitol Hill, for the N.A.A.C.P.’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, for the Center for American Progress and for Obama, including as deputy White House counsel.

<snip>

Thanks so much for posting this. I knew what a jerk Cotton is. I never knew what a treasure Cassandra Butts was. Thank you for making me look harder!