Drop the Recess Scheme

National Review Online

Friday, November 22, 2024

 

Matt Gaetz’s withdrawing his name from consideration to be attorney general removes the most pressing reason for Donald Trump to want to recess-appoint his entire cabinet. Trump should abandon the entire ill-considered recess idea.

 

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Trump will get every one of his other choices, or that he should. There remain very serious concerns about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as well as matters warranting Senate scrutiny before passing on some other nominees. For the DOJ post, next up is former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who will face ethics questions of her own but, we trust, none as lurid as Gaetz has.

 

But a Senate with 53 Republicans is fully capable of giving Trump’s cabinet choices a fair and expeditious hearing, and it is almost certain to confirm the great majority of them promptly. There is no emergency that would justify bypassing the traditional role of the Senate. Indeed, thanks to changes instituted in 2019 by Mitch McConnell for Trump’s particular benefit, the time for floor debate on nominees below the cabinet level is now significantly shorter (two hours rather than 30) than it was when Trump was first elected in 2016.

 

The more nominees he gets confirmed by the Senate, the more Trump’s executive departments can take action without a legal sword of Damocles over their heads, threatening to undo everything they undertake due to legal challenges to their appointments.

 

The theory advanced in favor of remaking the system in order to ram through Trump’s cabinet picks is that our institutions are so corrupt that the system itself needs a kind of shock treatment that can only be administered by people too radically antiestablishment to pass Senate scrutiny. But this is at best a remedy for the selection of inadequately prepared people set up to fail at their tasks and, at worst, an excuse for the elevation of unfit characters. Trump is also not the only one who was elected by the people. If the people of their states demand reforms of the executive branch, senators will listen.

 

There is a stronger case to be made that the existing Senate confirmation system, even with McConnell’s 2019 reforms, is too cumbersome to timely staff a new presidential administration at the sub-cabinet level. The solution to that problem should be to statutorily reduce the number of executive officers who require Senate confirmation. Many of these are jobs that answer to another Senate-confirmed officer, and whose occupants can be removed at will. But even if Senate confirmation was no longer required, it is likely that a number of those positions won’t have been filled before the Senate’s first natural recess of the year anyway.

 

With a popular-vote victory in hand, returning to Washington having previously served as president, and not under the sort of dubious investigation that dogged him in 2017, Trump ought to be better able to navigate the existing structures of our Constitution. He will be better off in the long run if he accepts those structures and focuses on delivering results within their bounds.

 

As for the Constitution and the role it gives the Senate, Republicans shall need them again when Trump is gone from office. Let this be good riddance to talk of scrapping them.