Today’s ruckus over Donald Trump concerns his demand that the Senate go into recess so he can make cabinet and other executive branch appointments quickly, and bypass the Senate confirmation kludge that often slows up appointments for months, and in some cases years. Some conservatives are up in arms about this as much as the left’s Resistance II (as I’m going to call it), because it undermines the separation of powers and the Senate’s specific constitutional “advice and consent” role.
This criticism has merit in the abstract, but everyone is missing two things. First, the confirmation process has become a kludge, and way for the opposition party to obstruct and delay an administration from running the executive branch. This ought to be regarded as a constitutional problem by itself.
The problem has gotten steadily worse over the last 50 years, and there ought to be the first clue. What happened 50 years ago? Watergate, and the subsequent “ethics” regime that immediately lengthened the background checks and reviews for appointees.
This leads to the second point: No amount of reformist tut-tutting is going to change this problem very much. So Trump is doing what he does best: go on offense with an aggressive move certain to upset the established order of things. If the Senate gives in to his demand, then Trump gets to speed up his appointments. But if not, maybe he’ll prod the Senate to speed up the process. Either way he makes progress and gets some of what he wants.
Only an unconventional political figure like Trump has the disposition to act this way, and a lot of otherwise politically savvy people still haven’t figured this out, or if they have, smugly conclude that what worked for Trump in the real estate development world can’t possibly work in Washington. We’ll see.
Likewise his brash announcement yesterday that Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo won’t be part of his next administration. Everyone has their hair on fire about it, suggesting it means Trump wants to install isolationists who will end NATO, capitulate to Russia, etc. (The parallel explanation is that he doesn’t want to elevate anyone who might be a rival to J.D. Vance in 2028, but this seems even less compelling than the neocon take.) I take it to be another bold stroke by Trump to stay on offense, and give a strong signal that nothing about his next administration will be business as usual.
It ought to be the first rule of sensible politics to always be on offense. Newt Gingrich understood this, and so does Trump. Why is it so hard for so many other Republicans to figure this out?
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