Working with an extremely thin Republican majority in the House, President-elect Donald Trump should not be appointing House Members to his administration. In doing so, he hurts his legislative agenda and undermines the importance of legislating itself.
As of this writing, Trump has announced the selection of two Republican representatives: Reps. Mike Waltz (R-FL) as national security adviser and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) as ambassador to the United Nations. (The latter post requires Senate confirmation.) Several other House members, potentially including Mike Rogers of Alabama for Secretary of Defense, reportedly are under consideration, although Speaker Mike Johnson says that Trump “fully understands and appreciates the math here.”
With due respect, if Trump appreciated it enough, he would not appoint Stefanik and Waltz. It takes 218 seats for a party to hold a House majority. As of this writing, the Associated Press and the New York Times both say Republicans have won 214 seats to 205 for the Democrats, with 16 still undetermined, while the respected Decision Desk HQ says the GOP has won 219 to the Democrats’ 210, with six races still uncalled. Each party leads in three of those six right now.
The likelihood, then, is that Republicans will hold around 222 seats, just four clear of majority status. If Stefanik and Waltz leave the House, the margin would fall to 220-213, and remain that way for months while special-election campaigns ensue to fill those spots. Alas, it’s a restless majority. All the same malcontents who pushed California’s Kevin McCarthy from the speakership and then tried to do the same, just a few months later, to Johnson, will remain in the House. They include wild conspiracy theorists, peddlers of horribly insensitive racial remarks, and outlandish demagogues. With Stefanik and Waltz gone, just four defections from among this rump caucus of between eight and 15 representatives could stop the Republican legislative agenda in its tracks.
In a system that long ago devolved into a two-party contest, surely the same electorate that voted to give Republicans tripartite control — president, Senate, and House — did not intend the party to be dysfunctional.
The problems with cannibalizing a closely divided House, though, involve more than mere partisanship. By giving the small caucus of legislative nihilists the ability to tie the whole House in knots, this would send yet another message, with concomitant practical effects, that legislating itself is unimportant. In other words, a president who deliberately creates the conditions for a House in constant turmoil effectively is aggregating to himself the job of governing via executive orders and bureaucratic lawmaking instead. But those changes can be undone by the next president just as easily, so the accomplishments won’t last.
That’s not how the system is supposed to work. It’s not representative democracy; it’s Caesarism.
Forgive a dose of political theory, but two of the great professors of government of the 20th century, Willmoore Kendall of the University of Dallas and George Carey of Georgetown University, explained this all eloquently and at some length in a 1970 book, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition. “The plain language of the Constitution,” they remind us, “tells us unambiguously that Congress is [designed to be] supreme.” By forcing the people’s representatives to find common ground among a multiplicity of interests, the Constitution “teaches us a morality of conciliation, moderation, and, above all, deliberation.”
The very basis of the American constitutional system, Carey and Kendall prove by inexorable logic, is that of “the representative assembly deliberating under God [emphasis in the original].”
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If Trump or any president acts to hobble the legislative process, though, leaving a void only the executive can fill, he takes away the idea that our government must reckon with what father of the Constitution James Madison called “the multiplicity of interests” that are at play in a large, representative, deliberative body.
Trump can fill his administration with tremendous talent without taking House members away from the jobs their constituents just elected them to fill. That’s exactly what he should do.