Cassandra Butts waited more than two years to be confirmed as the ambassador of the Bahamas — and was still waiting when she died suddenly last month at the age of 50 of undiagnosed leukemia. Senate Republicans had blocked Butts from the not-especially-high-profile gig as payback for Obama's Iran nuclear deal and, later, in an attempt to pressure Obama to take action over a Secret Service leak of private information about another member of Congress, The New York Times reports.
Neither issue had anything to do with Butts or the Bahamas.
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A law school friend of Obama's, Butts was nominated to the ambassadorship as a thanks for her decades of government and nonprofit work. To date, the Bahamas have been without an ambassador from the U.S. for over 1,647 days.
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