Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis is beginning to be mentioned as a candidate for the next secretary of homeland security, with speculation in Washington and Boston suggesting he may be in the mix for the prominent federal post.
Senators, who expect President Obama to announce his nomination in the next few weeks, have been told the White House is vetting “a handful of people,” according to a Senate source familiar with the talks but who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The White House would neither confirm nor deny whether Davis is on a list of candidates. But as the commissioner has become a fixture in Washington in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, he has gained a reputation as a no-nonsense cop who encouraged Congress to seek more answers on whether the FBI was doing enough to share its intelligence information.
“His service to Boston has been exemplary, and the Boston Police Department’s response to the Boston Marathon bombings was exceptional, ” Senator Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican and member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement to the Globe.
Members of the Massachusetts delegation to Congress, including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Niki Tsongas, on Thursday also praised Davis’s leadership during the Boston bombings.
“He demonstrated the kind of calm under pressure that would make him an excellent leader for Homeland Security,” Warren said in a statement.
Tsongas, a Lowell Democrat, also lauded Davis’s work as police chief of Lowell before taking the Boston job.
Davis declined to comment on the speculation, saying in a statement only, “I’m very happy serving the citizens of Boston.”
To date, much of the speculation has centered on several other candidates, including New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly; William J. Bratton, who has run the New York, Los Angeles, and Boston police departments; Thad Allen, a retired Coast Guard commandant; TSA administrator John Pistole; and Jane Holl Lute, who was the department’s former deputy secretary.
Several key lawmakers, including a few from Massachusetts, seemed caught off guard this week by talk that Davis also could be in the running. But some said the pick would make sense. Davis made an impression when he led the investigation into the Marathon bombings. He cut a national profile when he testified in the weeks after, appearing before several congressional committees.
The current secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, announced three weeks ago she was stepping down in September to become president of the University of California system.
The security role is an extremely challenging one, mixing law enforcement and border control issues with coordinating the government’s response to hurricanes and oil spills. The department also oversees immigration, and the next homeland security chief will come in at a time when the White House is aggressively pushing for immigration reform.
Napolitano, as former governor of Arizona, was in a position to be an advocate for reform and that may be a trait the Obama administration looks for in her replacement.
Power is confirmed as United Nations ambassador
WASHINGTON — The Senate easily confirmed President Obama’s selection for ambassador to the United Nations on Thursday, capping a month in which senators used a bipartisan truce on once-mired nominations to fill a cluster of vacancies in the president’s second-term administration.
Senators approved Samantha Power for the post by an 87-10 vote, which put the former Obama foreign policy adviser and outspoken human rights advocate into the job formerly held by Susan Rice, whom the president has made his national security adviser.
Power joined a stack of nominees that senators have approved since striking a bipartisan deal in mid-July. Republicans agreed to allow votes on seven of Obama’s picks after Democrats agreed to drop plans to invoke the so-called nuclear option, forcing Senate rules changes that would have made it harder for the chamber’s minority parties to block some nominations.
Over the past three weeks, senators have approved Obama’s choices to head the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and other agencies.
The Irish-born Power, a onetime journalist with a Harvard Law School degree, has reported from many of the world’s trouble spots and won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for a book on the meek US response to many 20th century atrocities, including those in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s. She has long backed intervention — including military force — to halt human rights violations.
Speaking against her nomination was Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida.
He said the next UN ambassador must focus on making sure the world organization is ‘‘more accountable, that it is more effective, and that it is just not some multilateral ideal in which we invest all of our hopes.’’ He said he doubted the administration’s and Power’s willingness to do that.
Power’s penchant for outspokenness includes her 2002 call for a ‘‘mammoth protection force’’ to prevent Middle Eastern violence, from which she has distanced herself. She also called the UN’s inaction to end the large-scale killing in Syria’s civil war ‘‘a disgrace that history will judge harshly.’’