The Age of Whispered Conversations

By Rich Lowry

Monday, November 18, 2024

 

We live in an age of whispered conversations.

 

There are aspects of American life that everyone, or nearly everyone, knows are absurd but is too afraid to speak out against and feels powerless to reverse.

 

It used to be said that if someone looked over his shoulder, he was about to tell an insensitive joke. Now people are worried about being overheard making what should be commonsensical observations.

 

Below are the kinds of conversations that are happening all the time.

 

The maternity-ward nurse in a low voice: “Where the form says ‘birthing parent,’ that means mother. They just changed it. It’s crazy.”

 

The staffer in a medical office explaining that the ethnic boxes need to be checked on another form even though the categories make no sense and confiding, “Maybe I should have checked ‘Hispanic’ myself at some point — I think we had a relative from Spain somewhere along the line.”

 

The group of moms together at the local coffee shop, making sure that no one else can hear from a nearby table: “Did you see what happened in the high-school track competition? Why are guys competing against girls?”

 

The staffer at a bank to a friend he or she can completely trust near the water cooler when it is absolutely certain no one else is around: “That training was ridiculous and a waste of time.”

 

It’s a little like what it must have been like in, say, East Germany when no one believed in the system, but no one dared let on what they were really thinking.

 

This phenomenon surely had an influence on the outcome of the election.

 

As the Financial Times has documented, progressives have moved far left on social issues, leaving the average voter closer to the right than the left.

 

Properly understood, Donald Trump’s opposition to trans surgeries for inmates and illegal immigrants and to males playing in female sports aren’t right-wing positions. They’ve only become perceived as such because progressives have embraced ideas that would — from the perspective of a decade ago or so — have been considered unthinkable as a matter of universal assent.

 

When Republicans have raised objections to these ideas, they have been portrayed by the Democrats and the press as the “culture warriors” and extremists.

 

Most people don’t buy this construct, though. They know how wokeness has been pushed into their lives as a deliberate choice by authorities who don’t care what they think — or, worse, will punish them for thinking the wrong thing.

 

Surveys show that Americans are now afraid of speaking their minds, and for good reason. Hence, the whispered conversations.

 

Trump won for many reasons. Surely, though, one of them was that he was a rare opportunity to register an audible dissent from woke impositions.

Democrats Must Pick Fights with Woke Activists

By Richard Hanania

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

 

Election pundits like to argue that the issues they care about most are also at the front of voters’ minds. However, it is difficult to dispute that wokeness harms the Democratic Party in national elections. Polls show overwhelming opposition to letting transwomen participate in women’s sports. In 2020, California voted by over fourteen points to continue the prohibition of affirmative action. At a more superficial but still politically meaningful level, Hispanics are more likely to say that they find the term “Latinx” offensive than they are to use it.

 

Some commentators on the Left maintain that opponents of wokeness largely got what they wanted from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Don Moynihan, for example, argues that Harris kept talk about identity to a minimum. She also endorsed a tough border bill, and walked back her previous support for government providing gender-confirmation surgery to imprisoned illegal immigrants.

 

This is all true, and when the Harris campaign published its policy proposals, I noted how remarkably free of identity issues they were. Nevertheless, voters are not wrong to connect Democratic governance with radical views on issues related to race and sex. Each political faction is considered responsible for what members of its coalition do. This is rational because governing is not only about the policies leaders implement, it is also about sins of omission that allow policy to move in undesirable directions. 

 

In California, governor Gavin Newsom and every other elected statewide official is a Democrat, as are large majorities in both state houses. Schools throughout the University of California system require DEI statements for aspiring faculty. At places like Berkeley and Santa Cruz, commitment to diversity isn’t simply one criterion among many—it serves as a threshold test for deciding which applications are even considered. Conor Friedersdorf calls this “a revolutionary change in how to evaluate professors.” The University of California system has also banned the consideration of standardised tests in admissions, removing the only objective measure schools have to select students according to merit.

 

Newsom did not run on diversity statements or banning standardised tests, and he never signed a law mandating these things. The problem is that regimes like these can only flourish in states under full Democratic control. State universities rely on legislatures for funding, and in most states, boards of regents are appointed by the governor. It is therefore reasonable to worry about politicians interfering with academic freedom, but it’s difficult to argue that states have no right to step in when public education has gone as far off the rails as the University of California system has. In places like Texas and Florida, state governments have acted to rein in left-wing excesses in the universities.

 

Even if no Democratic politician comes out for eliminating gifted classes in schools, diversity statements, racial preferences, pronouns in bios, biological males playing in female sports, or various other initiatives that fall under the banner of “wokeness,” voters correctly understand that Democratic rule is likely to result in all of these things, and probably much else that currently isn’t even part of the discussion. Voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio know that their university systems could easily be as woke as that of California if Republicans did not enjoy substantial representation in government.

 

What’s true about colleges also applies to primary and secondary education. Matt Yglesias notes that the Biden administration has had no principled objection to involving itself in local education issues. It has used its bully pulpit to attack the removal of LGBT-themed books from school libraries but said nothing about the elimination of gifted programs in the name of equity. 

 

Wokeness has rarely been directly imposed by elected officials. Rather, it is what you get when ideologues seize the reins in schools, universities, corporations, and government bureaucracies. Reasonable people can differ about how much authority the federal and state governments have to intervene under different circumstances. But in cases where the government itself engages in undesirable behaviour, like imposing soft racial quotas or turning state universities into left-wing monocultures, we need politicians who are going to chart a different course.

 

If Democrats are to reassure voters, they must start picking fights with woke activists. On the cultural level, there must be greater tolerance for internal dissent instead of treating reasonable and widely held positions as if they are beyond the pale. Congressman Seth Moulton took a step in the right direction by speaking up about transwomen in sports, but the backlash revealed why more Democrats don’t register their disagreements with the far-left—one of Moulton’s staffers resigned and others who have previously worked for him began circulating a critical letter. Where Democrats hold power, they should work to check woke excesses in areas where the use of policy levers is appropriate, and at least use their political platform to loudly disagree with leftists within their coalition when it is not.

 

One might argue that it doesn’t matter what Democratic office-holders do, because Fox and right-wing Twitter will always tar them with the Left’s most unpopular policies and rhetoric. But this is too pessimistic about the ability of politicians to shape the narrative. The media is so unused to Democrats pushing back on identity politics that a leader beginning to do so forcibly would get the attention of a man-bites-dog story. Outrage from former staffers and interns will only help to publicise the efforts of those adopting such positions. Until now, Democrats have shown themselves to be somewhere on the spectrum between enthusiastically backing identity politics and simply ignoring it. Only by actively opposing left-wing dogma can they begin to win back trust among their fellow Americans.

Better Energy

National Review Online

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

 

Joe Biden had a whole-of-government approach for green energy. Donald Trump is assembling a whole-of-government approach for energy. The omission of that one word makes a big difference.

 

Trump will appoint Chris Wright to be secretary of energy. Wright is the CEO of fracking firm Liberty Energy. He has said, “There is no climate crisis and we are not in the midst of an energy transition either.” Stuff like that comes as a shock to the media and the global environmental movement who can’t stop writing and advocating about those two things, but he’s correct on both counts. Climate change may pose challenges, but they are manageable challenges. And, a true energy transition is a long way off: Currently, green energy is more of an addition to global supply than anything else. It will be a relief to have leadership tethered to reality rather than alarmism and central-planning schemes praised as “ambitious” by our moral superiors.

 

Excepting the pandemic anomaly of 2020, U.S. carbon emissions per capita last year were the lowest they have been since 1939. They were highest in 1973 and have been in steep decline for the past 20 years. This follows a similar pattern in other wealthy countries where continued economic growth — not the “degrowth” some environmentalists want — has coincided with a reduction in per capita emissions.

 

Total U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions peaked in 2005. They have declined as fracking has become widespread and the population has continued to increase. Wright will be attacked as anti-environment, yet by making natural gas more plentiful as a replacement for coal in electricity generation, fracking has helped the environment more than every road-blocking protest and project-blocking lawsuit from the green movement combined.

 

Wright will be part of something Trump is calling the National Energy Council, a cross-department task force to be led by secretary of the interior nominee Doug Burgum. Burgum is the outgoing governor of North Dakota, one of the centers of America’s ongoing energy boom. As a presidential candidate, Burgum never caught on with voters, but he was a voice of calm and competence in an oftentimes shambolic field.

 

North Dakota has been hamstrung by lack of pipeline infrastructure to carry its energy products to market on the Gulf Coast. The Biden administration was slow-walking pipeline approvals, which we hope Burgum will be able to use his new energy leadership role to reverse.

 

As chairman of the National Energy Council, Burgum will also have a seat on the National Security Council. It’s correct to view energy policy as being connected with national security. When, for example, the Biden administration issued its moratorium on new LNG export terminals, it was also harming U.S. national-security efforts to wean Europe off Russian natural gas.

 

The U.S. went from exporting no natural gas as recently as 2016 to becoming the world’s largest exporter. There’s still plenty to do to build out infrastructure and fully capitalize on this relatively recent industrial advance.

 

The National Energy Council will face challenges common to any government task force that includes agencies from multiple departments. Burgum will need to be on guard against letting bureaucratic turf wars harm the administration’s policy goals. The White House should also be cautious to not overly formalize the council’s powers. We don’t want to see a Democratic administration in the future using a council created by Republicans to push even more corporate welfare for green energy or ramp up the progressive fight against functioning household appliances.

 

The U.S. will no doubt continue to develop green energy as well over the next four years, but companies should do so without taxpayer money. The full repeal of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act should be a priority for Republicans. Some energy companies will insist on keeping their handouts. Their cries should be resisted by the administration and Congress.

 

In 2023, Burgum called the IRA the “Inflation Creation Act” and said “it’s wrong on every front.” A lobbyist quoted in Politico said Wright’s appointment signals that the administration will go after the IRA with “a machete rather than a scalpel.” Sounds good to us.

Washington Is Shocked

By David A. Graham

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

 

At a rally in Las Vegas in September, the reggaeton star Nicky Jam came onstage in a Make America Great Again hat and endorsed Donald Trump. “We need you. We need you back, right? We need you to be the president,” he said. But after a comedian at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last month called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” the singer—whose father is Puerto Rican and who was raised partly on the island—had second thoughts.

 

“Never in my life did I think that a month later, a comedian was going to come to criticize my country and speak badly of my country, and therefore, I renounce any support for Donald Trump,” Nicky Jam said.

 

He had no right to be surprised. Trump himself had previously gone after Puerto Rico—he punished its leaders for criticizing him after Hurricane Maria, and sought to swap it for Greenland—but even if Nicky Jam had missed or forgotten that, he had to know who Trump was.

 

Nicky Jam was ahead of the curve. Since the election, Trump has moved swiftly to do things he’d said he’d do, and yet many people—especially his own supporters—seem stunned and dismayed. This is absurd. Surprise was perhaps merited in late 2016 and early 2017, when Trump was still an unknown quantity. But after four years as president, culminating in an attempt to erase an election he lost, Trump has demonstrated who he is. Somehow, the delusion of Trump à la carte—take the lib-owning, take the electoral wins, but pass on all of the unsavory stuff—persists.

 

In an article about how Trump’s transition is “shocking the Washington establishment,” Peter Baker of The New York Times writes: “Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is.” He’s right that the aberrant nature of the picks may be overlooked, as I have warned, yet it is also true that the actual unpredictability of them is overestimated.

 

On K Street, Politico reports, health-care-industry lobbyists can’t believe that Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. They were “expecting a more conventional pick,” even though Trump emphasized Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda late in the campaign, and even though Kennedy said that Trump had promised him control of HHS. To be sure, Kennedy is a shocking and disturbing pick, as Benjamin Mazer and my colleague Yasmin Tayag have recently written for The Atlantic, but his nomination should not come as a surprise—especially for people whose entire business proposition is being highly paid to advise clients on how Washington actually works. (The influence peddlers reportedly hope that senators will block Kennedy. The fact that they’re still waiting for someone else to solve their problems is further evidence of how little they’ve learned, years into the Trump era.)

 

Meanwhile, the New York Post, a key pillar of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media juggernaut, is similarly jittery about the Kennedy choice. Back when Kennedy was a thorn in President Joe Biden’s side, threatening to run against him in the Democratic primary, the Post’s editorial board was all too happy to elevate him. Now the board condemns his nomination and tells us that it came out of a meeting with him last year “thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.” The columnist Michael Godwin, who beamed on November 9 that Trump’s victory “offers the promise of progress on so many fronts that it already feels like Morning in America again,” was back a week later to complain that “it’s not a close call to say” that Kennedy and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, are “unfit” for the roles.

 

The lobbyists and editorialists are in good company, or at least in some sort of company. On Capitol Hill, Republican senators say they are shocked by many of Trump’s Cabinet picks. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who notoriously professed surprise when Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, is “shocked” at the Gaetz nomination. Gaetz’s House Republican colleagues are “stunned and disgusted.”

 

Reactions to Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense are less vitriolic, if no less baffled. “Wow,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told NBC. “I’m just surprised, because the names that I’ve heard for secretary of defense have not included him.” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was even blunter. “Who?” he said. “I just don’t know anything about him.”

 

If this is true, the senators could perhaps do with some better staff work. Hegseth was a real possibility to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration; more to the point, he was a prominent figure on Fox News, which is a dominant force in the Republican Party, from whose ranks Trump has repeatedly drawn appointees.

 

Staffers at the affected agencies have also expressed shock and horror at the prospect of an Attorney General Gaetz, a Defense Secretary Hegseth, or a Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

 

Ordinary Americans may also be taken aback. As I reported last month, Trump critics were concerned about a “believability gap,” in which voters opposed some of Trump’s big policy ideas, sometimes quite strongly, but just didn’t trust that he would really do those things. Although they perhaps deserve more grace than the Republican officials and power brokers who are astonished, they also had ample warning about who Trump is and how he’d govern.

 

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. He’s appointing officials such as Stephen Miller and Tom Homan who are committed to that, and yesterday morning, Trump confirmed on Truth Social a report that he would declare a national emergency and use the military to conduct mass deportations. And yet, when the roundups start in January, many people are somehow going to be taken by surprise.

Why an Attorney General Matt Gaetz Would Backfire on Trump

By John Yoo & Robert J. Delahunty

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

 

In nominating Matt Gaetz for attorney general, President-elect Trump has signaled his support for radical change at the Justice Department. As former DOJ attorneys, we do not doubt that the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency would benefit from significant reform. But by proposing a nominee as unqualified and as troubled as Gaetz, Trump would frustrate the very forces of reform that he would unleash.

 

The roadblocks to Trump’s agenda would grow even more difficult if the returning president were to resort to an unprecedented, untested theory of appointing Gaetz without Senate approval — a gambit that would plunge the DOJ into a political and legal quagmire.

 

The DOJ’s fall began with the FBI’s 2016 efforts to investigate Donald Trump for alleged ties to Russia and culminated in special counsel Jack Smith’s failure to drive Trump off the 2024 ballot. The Biden-Garland DOJ has pursued an agenda to divide Americans based on race and gender (see its defense of racial quotas in college admissions and its effort to force states to use race in drawing voting districts); it has sought to suppress free debate and discussion (such as the FBI’s efforts to coerce social media to censor “misinformation”); and it has applied the law in ways that appear clearly biased (e.g., in failing to protect churches and pro-life clinics from vandalization from pro-abortion extremists).

 

There are few reasons to nominate Gaetz to face the daunting challenge of reforming the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. But there are also bad reasons to oppose him. Among the bad reasons is the complaint that Gaetz is a “Trump loyalist.” A president has every right to expect his attorney general, and indeed all his appointees, to be “loyalists.”

 

Attorneys general do not enforce the law as if they were neutral judges without robes. An attorney general is, inescapably, a political appointee and serves at the will of the president. A president must make political choices — from interpreting the Constitution to allocating resources for fighting crime — in deciding how to fulfill his constitutional responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” As the Supreme Court has made clear, an attorney general is an executive branch officer who only assists the president in performing this core executive authority.

 

Because of the sensitivity of this duty, many presidents have chosen loyal friends and allies as attorney general: FDR and Robert Jackson, John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and his longtime associates William French Smith and Ed Meese, Barack Obama and his close friend Eric Holder.

 

Nor is it a valid objection that Gaetz is a controversial and outspoken advocate of the MAGA movement. Or that he is a firebrand who led the insurrection of House Republicans against ousted speaker Kevin McCarthy. For those who supported Trump, these may be desirable qualities.

 

The real problem with Gaetz’s nomination is that there are unanswered, fundamental questions about his character and fitness for the office. Gaetz stands accused of statutory rape and sex trafficking. To be sure, the DOJ did not file these charges after investigating them, though it has convicted several of his associates who also appear to have been involved.

 

But the House Ethics Committee has also investigated the accusations, and that committee was on the point of issuing a report of its findings when Gaetz’s nomination — and ensuing resignation from Congress — intervened.

 

Although House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed a desire to keep the report confidential, he does not control its disclosure, which is the prerogative of the Ethics Committee itself. And at this point it looks as if that committee may well release the report (even though it is said to be incomplete), at least to the Senate. In any case, it is highly unlikely that the Senate would confirm Gaetz without seeing it. In the past, the Senate Judiciary Committee has opposed nominees who refused access to their executive-branch files, for example. Unless the House report clears Gaetz, the Senate will not — and should not — confirm him.

 

If the next attorney general is to overhaul the Justice Department in the radical manner that Trump and the voters expect, he cannot perform his duties with his credibility already significantly damaged. Deporting illegal aliens who have engaged in sex trafficking has — rightly — been a signature issue for President Trump. This cause would not be served by an attorney general who former House colleagues believed had committed the same offense.

 

Gaetz’s legitimacy will be further undermined if he enters office through a legally dubious route. As the chances that the Senate will confirm Gaetz diminish, Trump might try to make an end run around the Senate and install Gaetz through a recess appointment. Such an attempt would probably be far more damaging to the administration than merely letting the Senate reject Gaetz’s nomination.

 

According to Article II of the Constitution, the president shall have the power to “fill up all vacancies which may happen during the recess of the Senate” until its next session (generally a period of two years). As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 76, the Senate’s advice-and-consent power acts as “an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President” and would operate to prevent “the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.” Allowing the president to unilaterally appoint officers made more sense when the Senate was often not in session because senators traveled to the Capitol by horse and sail and communicated with hand-carried letters.

 

More recently, presidents have resorted to recess appointments when partisan resistance has slowed appointments. Presidential frustration with the Senate’s slow pace is understandable, and the incoming president obviously wants to hit the ground running. But the Senate has been able to protect its constitutional role in the appointments process by staying constantly in pro forma session even when it has no scheduled votes or other business — a practice upheld by the Supreme Court in the 2014 Noel Canning case.

 

Indeed, a recess appointment of Gaetz might even be unconstitutional under the reasoning of Justice Scalia’s opinion in the Canning case — which was joined by three other conservative justices: Roberts, Thomas, and Alito. Scalia wrote that “the recess appointment power is an anachronism.” In Scalia’s view, the president can make a valid recess appointment only between sessions of Congress, not within a single session. The Senate recess in which Gaetz would notionally be “appointed” is within a session, not between sessions.

 

Resorting to a recess appointment is in any case a strange maneuver when the same party controls both the White House and Congress. The Republican Senate has every political incentive to consider Trump’s nominees speedily, to which new Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) has committed.

 

But a recess appointment of Gaetz might rest on even more legally dubious grounds. According to press reports, Trump is considering invoking a never-used constitutional provision that allows the president to throw Congress into adjournment when the House and Senate themselves cannot agree when to go out of session. To trigger the president’s power, the House would have to pass an adjournment of Congress that the Senate rejects. Trump could then adjourn Congress himself and appoint not just cabinet officers, but every nominee for whom Senate consent is required.

 

The Senate has ample tools to strike back. It could immediately call itself back into session and end the recess. Gaetz’s nomination would remain in limbo, and Trump would have succeeded only in antagonizing the Senate. The Senate could even go so far as to call up Gaetz’s nomination and vote it down as a show of its institutional independence.

 

Gaetz would still remain in office, but a Senate rejection of his nomination would deprive him of any political legitimacy. Senate-confirmed inferior officers, such as the U.S. attorneys who oversee federal prosecutions in every state and major American city, might ignore Gaetz’s commands with few political consequences.

 

A House that might have found Gaetz unfit to sit in Congress could find him unfit to sit in the executive branch and launch an impeachment investigation. Emboldened senators could use the fight over Gaetz to stall more nominations, even those to the judiciary, and delay other Trump priorities such as renewing tax cuts or boosting funding for border control.

 

The fight over Gaetz could therefore upend the new administration’s entire program.

 

If Trump tried out this novel gambit, moreover, a torrent of litigation over Gaetz’s appointment would ensue. Defendants could challenge every DOJ investigation and prosecution as the work of an unconstitutional attorney general. The courts might well agree. Not only would that hand the administration embarrassing defeats, but the litigation would ensnarl, delay, and possibly undo the very DOJ reforms that Trump seeks. Distracted from his duties by the widespread litigation, Gaetz would lose focus in driving through personnel and policy changes. And in the worst case, the Supreme Court could void all of Gaetz’s decisions while occupying an illegal recess appointment. Trump’s legal program could be set back by one or two years.

 

President Trump would not be well served by having an attorney general who was preoccupied for a year or more with his own fate. For much of Trump’s prior term, Jeff Sessions, his first attorney general, was recused from the “Russian collusion” investigation for having had contact with a Russian official before Trump took office. That recusal sidelined Sessions from the Justice Department’s most important business. Sessions would have served the president better by resigning. And Gaetz would serve the returning president better by withdrawing.

Politics Will Return

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

 

In the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, a CIA honcho is criticized by a junior colleague for working with a disreputable character. “Yeah, you’re right,” replies the spook. “We should just deal with nice people.”

 

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk—it’s been a terrific few weeks for Bond villains. 

 

Trump is riding high just now. He has been elected president again and did so while winning more votes overall than did his Democratic opponent, whose name escapes me just now, as, indeed, it apparently eluded millions of Democrats on Election Day. (There is no such thing as the “national popular vote,” but, given that Trump won in 2016 with fewer votes coast-to-coast than did the wife of that guy who used to be the president a long time ago, the overall vote share is significant.) With his ridiculous Cabinet nominations, he has once again demonstrated that there is no depth of self-abasement to which he cannot bully Republicans into plumbing.

 

And he even got to MSNBC!

 

Joe Scarborough, formerly a Republican member of the House and currently the host of the big morning program on MSNBC, became a critic of Donald Trump after having been a key early booster. It would be fair to say he has been a trenchant critic. It would even be fair to say he has been a hair-on-fire critic—that is his own characterization, not mine. (In the interest of full disclosure: I have been a guest on Morning Joe a few times and have gotten to know Scarborough a little bit over the years, and I think of him as a friend.) In spite of his strong opposition to Trump, Scarborough and his co-host (and wife), Mika Brzezinski, made the trip down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the president-elect in the hopes of establishing a more productive exchange going forward. 

 

This was not what you would call “well-received” among the MSNBC tribe. 

 

Scarborough is in the funny position of being a former Republican officeholder with a very big footprint on the cable channel that the more energetic kind of progressives consider their own turf. While his views and attitudes have evolved over the years, his baseline sensibility has always been one shared with the very people who first rallied to Trump’s cause: New York City outer-borough types and suburbanites with Catholic backgrounds of the sort we used to refer to as “white ethnic.” Scarborough is a Southerner, but he wouldn’t be out of place in Long Island; when I first got to know him, he was living in the Connecticut suburbs of New York and seemed right at home there. And, in fact, he took a rather more positive view of Trump for a time.

 

Scarborough’s largely left-leaning audience of course went ape when he reported the meeting on his show. MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin unsubtly pressed for a boycott targeting her own channel in response to the “disgusting” spectacle of … well, what, exactly? Two people who host a news-talk show meeting with an elected official? 

 

Brzezinski pointed to the case of her father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a major foreign-policy figure in the Johnson and Carter administrations and who was the principal architect of the U.S. response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Students of 20^th-century history will no doubt be mindful that the anti-communist project involved talking to a lot of people who were not very nice at all. One can be too indulgent—even the best of us easily can be too indulgent—but one of the lessons of the anti-Soviet campaign is that it probably is better to maintain an open line of communication to Idi Amin than to enjoy the fleeting moral satisfaction that would come from cutting the lines.

 

(Jonah Goldberg will not forgive me if I fail to note Dr. Amin’s full handle: His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas. Donald Trump is hardly the first specimen of his kind.)

 

The most important question in practical politics (and in much else) is: “Compared to what?” If you believe that Scarborough has sullied himself and MSNBC by meeting with the president-elect and then explaining the meeting to his audience, then what do you imagine the preferable alternative to be? As Scarborough concedes, the “Resistance” stuff and the hair-on-fire stuff has failed—obviously and spectacularly!—on its own terms. I understand the anathematizing impulse and sympathize with it to a considerable extent: My writing this will lead to some awkward conversations in the near future, no doubt, but I do not believe that there is any honorable way to serve in the Trump administration. Joe Scarborough isn’t looking for a new job, though: Covering politics is already his job. 

 

What cable-news commentators do isn’t exactly what a New York Times political reporter does in terms of the tenor of the journalism, but it is a variation on the theme. The instinct of news outlets (and MSNBC, whatever its deficiencies, is still one of those) to pet their audiences and to flatter their prejudices has been one of the most destructive trends in recent journalism—second only to the audiences’ own demand that their news and commentary providers pander to them. About three times a week, somebody criticizes me for failing to defer to my constituency, and I have to remind them that I am not running for elected office. 

 

(There’s only one elected job I think I’d enjoy having, and Brewster County already has a sheriff, about whom I know nothing other than the facts that he looks exactly like a sheriff of Brewster County is supposed to look and needs a new truck.)

 

In some ways, my judgment of Trump enablers such as Mike Pence and Ted Cruz (and Mike Lee and J.D. Vance and …) is more exacting than my judgment of Trump himself. Whatever else you may say about Trump, he has nowhere and at no time given me the impression of being a man who knows better. You don’t blame Trump for being Trump any more than you blame a mosquito for biting you. You just hope you don’t get malaria or dengue or West Nile or whatever.

 

Politics will be back. It will be back presently and with a vengeance. One of the reasons for that—and I will have more to say about this in Part 2 later this week—is that it is in the nature of factions to subdivide into two or more new factions once they have achieved a position of dominance, however temporary or unstable. The Trump element today owns the Republican Party, most of whose members are happy to be owned, and, if nothing else, the economics of competing grifts will ensure that the faction is acrimonious, rapacious, and riven. And Trump is a lame duck before even being sworn in. It is going to be a mess. But it is not going to be the end of the world, or the end of these United States. 

 

(Probably.)

 

I have interviewed all sorts of distasteful people over the course of my career. In fact, I had agreed to an interview with Donald Trump back in 2012, when he also was kicking around the idea of running for president. I’ve interviewed communists, Nation of Islam representatives, pornographers, Flat Earthers, conspiracy kooks, and Bernie Sanders voters who checked more than one of the previous boxes. It’s what you do in my line of work. 

 

The politics of cooties is bad enough. Journalism of cooties—where we just don’t talk to people we personally think poorly of—isn’t journalism at all.

 

Scarborough notes that the internet world reacted hysterically and histrionically to his meeting with Trump, whereas in the real world, most people took the meeting and his reporting of it to his audience as a matter of course. That is part of the problem, too: Since the introduction of the first iPhone nearly two decades ago, the internet has been transformed from a tool into an environment, from a kind of wide-open virtual place one visits from time to time to a suffocating place one escapes from only time to time, if at all. That, as much as the ghastly particularities of Donald Trump, is the rancid secret sauce of our current political moment. But it is possible to counteract it.

 

I do not think that temperateness probably comes naturally to Joe Scarborough or to me—in our time, the commentary business typically does not reward the even-keeled—but the pursuit of a virtue can be, at times, as worthwhile as the achievement of it. And, as a cynical practical matter, temperateness might end up being a better strategy for containing Donald Trump, who thrives on drama, especially in the form of emotionally charged adversarial performances. Trump does not want things to quiet down—nominating Matt Gaetz as attorney general is at least as much about the reaction to that nomination as it is about Gaetz himself, probably more. If you wanted to torture Trump, all you would need is a quiet, comfortable room with no television or wi-fi. He would rather be screamed at by his enemies than sit in silence. If Trump could be shouted down or shamed into being a better sort of man, we’d have stopped thinking about him at all around 1983.

 

Maybe Scarborough is right and that it is time to try calming down. Because the other way of doing things hasn’t produced the results we had wanted.

The Senate Should Assert Its Power to Block Bad Nominees

National Review Online

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

 

Since Donald Trump won the election on November 5, a number of prominent voices have suggested that, courtesy of his “electoral mandate,” the president-elect should face no scrutiny from Congress whatsoever. Presumably, the details of this claim will evolve over time, but for now it has manifested itself in the insistence — echoed by Trump himself — that the Senate ought to put itself into recess rather than to meaningfully evaluate his executive-branch nominees.

 

Anticipating the criticism that, by conferring upon the U.S. Senate its powerful “advise and consent” role, the Framers of the Constitution had deprived the American presidency of the sole authority “to make the appointments under the federal government,” Alexander Hamilton laid out two persuasive arguments in the pages of Federalist No. 76. “It is not likely,” Hamilton predicted, “that their sanction would often be refused, where there were not special and strong reasons for the refusal.” But on the rare occasions that it happened, it “would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.” The result, Hamilton concluded, would be “stability in the administration” and a reduction in the numbers of those “disadvantages which might attend the absolute power of appointment.”

 

A quarter of a millennium later, these words have proven wise. It is, indeed, relatively rare for the Senate to deny the president his appointments. But it is not unknown. And, when it does occur, it typically benefits the executive every bit as keenly as the legislature that stands in opposition. Now, as then, the core of the American system of government remains the division of power — horizontally, among the three federal branches, and, vertically, between the federal government and the states (or the people). In some circumstances, this arrangement exists to foster a diversity of political opinion. In others — including the appointments process — it reflects the understanding that to increase the number of people who are required to make a decision is to reduce the opportunity for caprice. After all, presidents — even wildly popular presidents — are still liable to err.

 

As we noted last week, the recess idea is, at best, an affront to the Constitution and, at worst, downright illegal. But it is also politically suicidal — both for Donald Trump and for the senators he wishes to render supine. The story of the 2024 presidential election is complex, but, at its core, it is the story of the rejection of the reckless Biden years coupled with a heartfelt desire to return to normalcy. That word — “normalcy” — may seem a peculiar one to apply to Donald Trump, a sui generis figure if there ever was one.

 

And yet, by and large, it is true. When asked to explain their votes, most Americans made it clear that they wanted a strong economy, a peaceful world, a secure border, and the rejection of preposterous social experiments that were contrived in the faculty lounge last week. Very few of those voters — if any at all — hoped for chaos, incompetence, or the mixture of national power with private grievance. Still fewer signed up to outsource their judgment in its entirety to the whim of Donald Trump and his friends. Insofar as Trump’s agenda intersects with their own desires, voters will indulge his foibles. But he ought not to mistake this for a blank check. Joe Biden, who committed that error early on in his tenure, understands its consequences well.

 

Naturally, the vast majority of Trump’s nominees will sail through easily — and deserve to. That a handful will not — and, indeed, that they do not deserve to — is the product of their obvious unsuitability for office. Inevitably, Trump’s apologists will insist loudly that he is being thwarted by wreckers and squishes and enthusiasts for the status quo. But this is so much guff. A nominee who cannot get past a Senate with a 53-47 Republican majority is a nominee who does not deserve to be confirmed. At present, Trump is an object of adulation within a Republican Party that’s eager to express fealty at every available opportunity. That, within this environment, some of Trump’s picks have nevertheless inspired skepticism and grumbling is a testament to their incongruity — and, dare we say, precisely why the Senate was given the power of review in the first instance.

 

Nor is it true, as it is sometimes claimed, that Trump must use extraordinary measures because he has previously been ill-used by the Senate in filling his cabinet. In 2017, ten of Trump’s cabinet nominees were confirmed by the end of February — a faster pace than in Biden’s first months, when he got eight confirmed by Senate Democrats by the end of February. Only one of Trump’s original first-term cabinet nominees, for secretary of labor, was not confirmed.

 

The three selections who deserve to be blocked are Matt Gaetz, who has been nominated for attorney general; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been nominated to head up Health and Human Services; and Tulsi Gabbard, who has been nominated as the new director of national intelligence. None of the three are qualified for their roles, and, if they are approved nevertheless, they will become headaches for the president and liabilities for the Republican Party more broadly. (Those who respond to this by asking “But what about Biden’s appointees?” ought to ask themselves how that worked out for the Democrats.) Matt Gaetz is a self-aggrandizing bomb-thrower who lacks the skill to run the Department of Justice and has neither the temperament nor the guile to push through the reforms that President Trump evidently wishes to see. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a habitual crank who has never met a conspiracy theory that he did not like and who belongs nowhere near an agency that controls more than 20 percent of the federal budget. Tulsi Gabbard has spent years as an apologist for Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin, is a former Bernie Sanders-esque socialist, and has given no indication at any point in her political career that she ought to be the one person in America responsible for briefing the president on intelligence. Happily, the United States is home to some of the most intelligent, accomplished, hardworking people in the world — and, contrary to the implications of the media, many of those people are strong supporters of Donald Trump. It would be possible — easy, even — for Trump to find three of them to fill these vital roles and to advance his aims without distraction. To decline to do so is a choice.

 

All of which is to say that Trump’s nascent battle to undermine the power of the Senate is ultimately being waged in behalf of a false premise. Contrary to the allegations of Trump’s acolytes, the brewing fight is not between Trump’s mandate and the Senate’s recalcitrance, but between Trump’s getting 95 percent of what he wants and his being awarded untrammeled control of Washington, D.C. In blocking the bad apples among Trump’s nominees, the Senate must act not to “send a message” or to flex its atrophied muscles or to engage in reflexive oppositional defiance, but to ensure that America gets the sort of sober, focused, resolute governance that will be the prerequisite to the survival of this unified Republican government — and whose absence, if things are permitted to unravel from the start, will serve as its avoidable downfall.