In a potential blow to the “Donald Trump is NOT a fascist!” crowd, the president-elect has made a fascist-adjacent demand: He wants to install government officials without Senate approval.
You may have heard Trump promoting “recess appointments” lately. That provision allows the president to fill important government vacancies when Congress is not in session. It’s essentially meant for emergency situations, not for an incoming president who wants to bypass checks on who he picks to run key parts of the federal government.
It’s easy to see why Trump wants to do this, since many of his Cabinet choices thus far reside somewhere between comical and patently absurd. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – a conspiracy theorist, anti-vaccine polio-enthusiast and road-kill-eating nut-bird – as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Noted dog-gunner Kristi Noem for Homeland Security. Matt Gaetz, an ethically challenged forehead that became a real boy, for attorney general. A Fox News host with big biceps and problematic tattoos to head up the Department of Defense.
Most of them couldn’t get hired as your local dogcatcher – except maybe South Dakota Gov. Noem if she lived in a town run by cats – so Trump’s desire to dodge a confirmation process that would pull the curtain back on this parade of nincompoops is understandable.
Of course Trump wants recess appointments – it’s another norm to break
But using recess appointments to stock an administration is not at all what the Founding Fathers intended.
Noted non-liberal Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in 2014 that recess appointments are “essentially an historic relic, something whose original purpose has disappeared,” noting: “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists, and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the President to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process.”
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Alexander Hamilton – you know, the guy from the musical – wrote why Senate confirmation of presidential appointments is crucial to democracy, concluding that with this process the president “would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”
If Trump had his way, all Republicans would be required to get a neck tattoo that reads: “Obsequious Instruments of His Pleasure.”
Republicans wanted Trump. They should let him pick whoever he wants.
This is why I think, against all common sense and despite loud warnings from anyone who understands democracy, GOP lawmakers should go ahead and give Trump his recess appointments. Don’t bother the poor man with things he hates, like “norms” and “standards” and “the Constitution.”
The china shop may belong to all of us, but Republicans are the ones who just released the bull. I say let him rip.
Hannibal Lecter to lead USDA? Sure, why not?
Because when Trump appoints an on-fire Tesla to head up the Department of Transportation, I want the Republican Party to own it.