Senate Republicans Have a Job to Do

By Yuval Levin

Saturday, November 16, 2024

 

We shouldn’t over-romanticize the jobs that people in Washington have. Politicians, administration officials, judges, generals, and the like are just people. Their jobs are just jobs, if sometimes exceptionally challenging and important ones. There are a lot of talented, smart men and women in America with the relevant experience and skills who could do those jobs.

 

But as a new administration gets started, this reality cuts in two directions. On the one hand, it means that we should moderate our expectations about the sorts of people who might be appointed to high office. They don’t need to be world-historical statesmen. There’s always a kind of barrier of imagination on that front in these moments — it’s just hard to envision someone new becoming secretary of state or running some other big agency. But these are management jobs, which have taken shape around a range of different principals over time, and they don’t require superhuman prowess.

 

On the other hand, it means that we should think critically about the particular qualifications for these jobs in relatively mundane terms too. Most people — like me and maybe you — aren’t at all well suited or qualified to run any given government agency. And we should not suspend our judgment about that because we think somehow these jobs are just about intelligence or charisma, or even because we think only the president can make the relevant judgments about people’s qualifications.

 

All of us can have opinions about those qualifications, but the Constitution assigns the U.S. Senate the role — itself just a routine part of the altogether doable job that senators have — of exercising that judgment in a binding way, and approving or rejecting the president’s appointments for important executive positions. The reason for giving the Senate that role is to restrain the president’s inclination to appoint otherwise unfit people because he owes them a favor or because he expects them, as Alexander Hamilton so well put it, to possess “the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.” The Framers expected Senate rejections of presidential nominees to be fairly rare, but believed that making the power of rejection a part of the job of senators was essential to avert the worst excesses of executive malfeasance.

 

Grasping this character of the task before the Senate could help us better understand the drama of the past week, and the demands of the coming ones. Most of the people President-elect Trump has so far proposed for key positions in his administration have been within the range of what the Senate, even if grudgingly, should abide. His choices to run the departments of State, Interior, and Homeland Security, for instance, and to run the CIA and represent the United States at the United Nations, are the kinds of people with the kinds of backgrounds who generally have those kinds of jobs. Some senators (especially Democrats) will object to them on substantive policy grounds, which is fine. But they should, and probably will, be confirmed.

 

Some of the other people Trump has appointed are the kinds of nominees whom the Senate tends to treat as borderline approvable — requiring particularly thorough vetting in confirmation hearings and perhaps ultimately unsuited to the job. Just about every modern president has had some senior appointments who fell into this category and has seen one or a few of them rejected. Trump’s appointments for defense secretary and for director of national intelligence seem to answer to this description.

 

Pete Hegseth served honorably in uniform and has thought a great deal about some of the Pentagon’s challenges. But he has not otherwise served in government, has never run anything even approaching the scope of the immense Pentagon bureaucracy, and has built a career around bombastic denunciations of it that aren’t much like what a secretary of defense would need to do most of the time. He’ll get a close look because he’s far from an obvious fit, but I would guess he’ll ultimately be confirmed: He’s well suited to impressing Republican senators who are in any case very reticent to cross Trump more than they absolutely have to.

 

Tulsi Gabbard is a former Democratic member of Congress who also served honorably in uniform and then rose through Hawaii politics and served four terms in the U.S. House. But her lack of experience in intelligence work at any level, her lack of management and administrative experience, and especially her penchant for conspiracies and parroting of Russian talking points regarding American policy will obviously present serious red flags for many senators, given the sensitivity and importance of the job she’s up for. I think there’s a decent chance she will ultimately be rejected.

 

But beyond these familiar categories of qualified and borderline nominees, Donald Trump has also presented the Senate in the last few days with (so far) two nominees who should be plainly and utterly unapprovable. Whatever they think of the political dynamics involved, senators should see that their jobs, at their most mundane and inescapably job-like level, require them to reject these two.

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a raving conspiracist with a dangerously loose grip on reality. Maybe that makes him an ideal match for Donald Trump, but that is not the question before the Senate. The question before the Senate is whether he should run the Department of Health and Human Services, and the answer — even after accounting for some due deference to the president’s preferences — is that he very obviously should not.

 

There are many traditional political reasons for Republican senators to object to Kennedy’s nomination — like his support for abortion and single-payer health care and his complete lack of any relevant experience in government or in administration or management. But that he is a reckless crackpot, and that a lot of the ridiculous lies he peddles and believes have directly to do with the work of the agency he is seeking to run, are more fundamental and inescapable reasons. Most Republican senators seem to know this, but they appear to think denying the president his choice for this position would be an extraordinary and explosive move. It would not. It’s a straightforward part of their job, and if enough of them join together to announce they will do it in advance, it would just mean Trump has to choose someone else.

 

A similar logic applies to Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. Here, too, the familiar measures of qualification would already point to trouble. Gaetz has very little experience as a lawyer, none in law enforcement, and has never run anything. But he has been a legislator for 14 years, which is certainly meaningful experience. In traditional terms, he might be borderline approvable. But again, as with Kennedy, the fundamental problem is a matter of character, and in ways that directly bear on the job Gaetz is seeking.

 

Even putting aside various serious accusations about his private behavior, his public actions as a member of Congress show that he is unprincipled and irresponsible, and refuses to be bounded by any sorts of rules or norms. Gaetz has shown an exceptional ability to operate within an institution without in any way being constrained or shaped by its purpose or by his role in it. That is exactly the opposite of what you would want in the leader of the federal agency most responsible for the facilitating and administering of the rule of law. It’s precisely how DOJ has gone wrong when it has gone wrong in recent years, and the idea that Gaetz could fix that is thoroughly belied by simply everything about him.

 

This resistance to institutional roles, along with his bottomless fealty to Trump, is again precisely why he must have seemed to the president like a good fit. But the Senate should want to avoid an AG who would simply be the president’s “obsequious instrument,” and more generally should be looking for a good fit for the job, not for the president. No senator could seriously believe that Gaetz is such a fit. And it is simply and plainly their job to say so.

 

Defenders of these appointments, and of Trump’s more borderline appointments too, have generally evinced their own kind of romanticization of the jobs in question. The cases for them tend to fall into arguments like “that place needs a good hard shock” or “only a jerk could clean up that department.” This is fine as a general expression of disgust at the excesses of a terrible bureaucracy, but not as a job description for a senior administrator. An inclination to destroy something is not evidence of an ability to manage it, or reform it, or improve it — quite the contrary.

 

We do need a functional Pentagon, and a reliable Justice Department, and effective health and welfare programs. And getting from here to there would require some vision of how those ought to work and a capacity to organize that work and give it direction. This would require some demolition, but also a lot of construction and renovation — a lot of mundane everyday administrative leadership.

 

To suggest that these jobs require purely performative disrupters who know how to go viral is to equate talk with action and to mistake the character of these positions no less than to suggest that they call for superhuman statesmanship. And to insist that the old criteria no longer matter because Donald Trump managed to get 49.9 percent of the popular vote and so we are in some new epoch of post-something-or-other is to set the president and the country up for failure.

 

That President-elect Trump made these poor choices suggests that he is in the grip of these mistakes himself. And that could hardly come as a surprise. He is a man of deep delusions, who frequently confuses talk and action. He seems to be naming press secretaries, rather than chief executives, for some of these departments. Even after having been president for four years, he does not appear to have a clear conception of what his chief subordinates are actually supposed to do, and therefore also of what he is supposed to do, and what he did well and poorly last time. He seems to think that where he failed it was because he was not sufficiently himself, and he allowed himself to be restrained.

 

This is roughly the opposite of the truth, and Trump’s potential for policy and political success this time depends decisively on his being restrained some. This is why the Senate doing its job, even when that job involves resisting Trump’s will, is also essential to his effectiveness and to the possibility of advancing some of the agenda that Trump and congressional Republicans have in common.

 

These appointments could end up posing a real risk to that agenda. But it is far from clear that Trump and his team, ensconced as they are in a thick, musky cocoon of digital self-congratulation, are aware of the risks they run by starting out this way. Bad administrators would obviously make effective administrative action more difficult. And genuinely durable policy accomplishments will require legislation, too.

 

Trump probably has about 18 months to advance such legislation before Congress is fully taken up with mid-term elections in which at least the House will be in play. Republicans have very narrow majorities in both houses, and getting anywhere on any legislative front under these circumstances will require momentum and focus, both of which could be undone by avoidable intra-Republican controversies.

 

That risk might be especially great if the president-elect pursues a strategy of recess appointments. Republican senators don’t want to resist or oppose Trump. But even they might discover some hint of institutional pride if the president demands that the Senate shutter its operations for a while so that he can circumvent the constitutionally required confirmation process and put in place cabinet officials that most senators oppose.

 

The whole idea is a constitutional abomination, of course. No one thinks this is the purpose of recess appointments. And worse still is the notion floated by some around Trump of forcing a recess by having the House adjourn and either pressuring the Senate to comply or using the president’s (never before used) power to force an adjournment during which he would make recess appointments. The very idea that the speaker of the House would collude with the president to undermine the Senate’s constitutional role and effectively make the legislative branch a passive plaything of the executive should outrage any member of Congress.

 

Or at least it would if members were inclined to do their jobs. That’s the challenge that now confronts Republican senators in particular. They need to see it not as an existential crisis or a shocking exigency, but part of the perfectly doable role they’ve sought out and won just as the president won his. Their job in this moment is to express their honest judgment of the qualifications of some presidential nominees, and to insist on some of the most basic prerogatives of the institution they occupy. If they mean to do that, they should make it clear now, in advance, so that the president-elect can move along to put more acceptable nominees before them for these positions.

 

If senators can do their job forthrightly in this moment, they would make it just a little more likely that the president and his cabinet might do theirs too.

 

Is that too much to ask? We’ll soon find out.