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The post-election presidential transition period is relatively brief — Donald Trump will be inaugurated in just 70 days — and there is an enormous amount of work to do to ensure a smooth transfer of power between administrations. Even competent presidents-elect who care about governing find the challenges daunting.
All things considered, however, the last thing Trump has to worry about is Senate confirmation of his nominees. The Republican majority is likely to have 53 members in the new Congress, and there will be nothing the Democratic minority — or even the GOP’s so-called “moderate” faction — can do to stop the Senate from serving as a rubber stamp for the incoming White House’s administrative selections.
And yet, the issue is apparently very much on the president-elect’s mind. NBC News reported:
President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday involved himself publicly in the Senate leadership race for the first time, writing on Truth Social that anyone running to be the next Senate majority leader should agree to let him make recess appointments to his cabinet.
The Senate GOP’s current leader, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, is poised to step down after 17 years. Three Republicans — South Dakota’s John Thune, Texas’ John Cornyn and Florida’s Rick Scott — are vying to succeed him, and by most accounts, Thune is the front-runner, though Scott has picked up enthusiastic backing from a variety of right-wing figures, including Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck and Charlie Kirk. (The leader will be chosen by way of a private ballot, so members won’t have to worry about too great a backlash.)
It was against this backdrop that Trump turned to his social media platform to make an unexpected appeal. “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner,” the president-elect wrote.
I suspect that many political observers have forgotten what recess appointments even are, and for good reason: It’s been a while since they were relevant.
The basic idea is that the Constitution empowers a president to make emergency personnel appointments when Congress is not in session. Plenty of White Houses have tried to do play fast and loose with this power, but in 2014, a unanimous Supreme Court strengthened lawmakers’ hand.
What’s more, for the last couple of decades, lawmakers have held pro forma legislative sessions precisely to prevent presidents from making appointments without congressional consent.
Trump, evidently, finds this unacceptable.
Predicably, McConnell’s would-be GOP successors responded to the president-elect’s missive by issuing statements designed to make Trump happy, offering fresh evidence that too many congressional Republicans are prepared to act as Trump’s employees, rather than elected officials serving in a co-equal branch of government.
But let’s not miss the forest for the trees: Five days after he won a second term, one of Trump’s first priorities was to take aim at a basic element of checks and balances. Despite the circumstances that will effectively ensure that all of his nominees are confirmed anyway, regardless of merit or qualification, the incoming Republican president wants greater authority to circumvent the Senate altogether and simply install whomever he wants to powerful posts.
When many of us warned ahead of Election Day that Trump, running on an authoritarian-style platform, would deliberately take steps to undermine democracy if he prevailed, we weren’t kidding.