What the tumult in the foreign relations committee over Secretary Bolton turns out to be about is who gets to run the government – the elected officials and their appointees, or the permanent bureaucracy. Senator Voinovich, a Republican from Ohio, yesterday explained his decision to oppose the nomination by saying that he spent four days this month with career foreign service officers on a trip to the Balkans. They assured the senator that Mr. Bolton was “not what they consider to be the ideal person.” Another Bolton opponent, Senator Biden, referred to an anti-Bolton letter from “102 former career ambassadors.”

The senators, and President Bush himself, could do worse than to reread Newt Gingrich’s article in the August 2003 edition of Foreign Policy, or his remarks about the State Department that year at the American Enterprise Institute. The former speaker of the House wrote that the foreign service was engaged in a “deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president’s foreign policy.” Mr. Gingrich was scoffed at by the usual suspects, and his ideas for reform weren’t implemented by the Bush administration. It’s too bad, because now those same foreign service officers aren’t just undermining the president’s policy, but his nominee.

Mark the pattern. The day after Mr. Bush, in January 2002, proclaimed Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an “axis of evil,” the State Department issued talking points to ambassadors insisting that American foreign policy had not changed. Mr. Bolton used to carry a copy of the “axis of evil” speech to State Department meetings and quote from it when career diplomats recommended various sorts of rapprochement with the axis. When the president urged the Palestinian Arabs to seek new and different leaders, the State Department sent private American citizens to meet with Yasser Arafat to persuade him to nominate his longtime sidekick, Mahmoud Abbas.

Or take the case of a State Department civil servant, Christian Westermann, whom Democrats contend Mr. Bolton tried to fire after Mr. Westermann objected to language in a speech Mr. Bolton gave to the Heritage Foundation. To listen to the Senate Democrats, you would think Mr. Westermann should have a veto over the words of the undersecretary of state the president appointed.

Now, there are many honorable individuals in the foreign service who risk their lives every day for salaries that are below what they might be making in the private sector. But it would be a terrible thing for the country if a group of entrenched bureaucrats were to arise that was immune to political direction. As it is, there are a total of about 15,000 foreign service and civil service employees in the State Department, and only a few dozen political appointees. If the unelected careerists are going to determine what the policy is and who is an acceptable ambassador at the United Nations, why bother having political appointees, or even elections, at all?

If this fight were just about Mr. Bolton, as capable a diplomat though he is, there might be a case for the White House to cut its losses in this nomination fight. But to do so in the face of the kind of challenge we’ve seen from the foreign service would be to diminish the powers of the presidency and of the voters of America to influence their own government. It would be just one more way that the bureaucrats undermined the president’s pro-democracy agenda.