Republican Senators and members of Congress have a job, and it is not to simply hand President-elect Donald Trump the keys.
The House and Senate majorities should and will work closely with the 47th president to advance conservative priorities, but they shouldn’t cede their constitutional powers to the executive branch, which has already accumulated way too much power over the past 70 years.
Specifically, the Senate shouldn’t waive its responsibility to advise and consent on top executive branch appointments. Trump and some of his allies want the Senate to immediately go into a 10-day recess when Trump is sworn in, allowing him to fill every spot he wants with a recess appointment, which would last until January 2026.
There’s a reasonable argument for this strategy: Democrats, following the destructive lead set by the late Harry Reid, have a practice of slowing down the confirmation of Republican nominees simply to handicap the Republican administration. This is doubly effective for Democrats because the permanent bureaucracy is overwhelmingly liberal, and so the fewer political appointees in a GOP administration, the more power Democrats hold in the administration.
The short-term partisan gains of filling the Trump administration immediately do not outweigh the long-term harms of further castrating the legislative branch and empowering the executive.
Since World War II, Congress has steadily lost control over the government, and the executive branch has steadily grabbed power. It’s so bad that most Americans, and many members of Congress, don’t even realize that the constitutional order has been inverted. It is now expected that the executive will make law, and when Congress even considers asserting itself, it is seen as meddling.
America’s news media is infatuated with experts, and so it is much more comfortable with career bureaucrats making the rules than with elected officials, who are not experts, making them.
However, the Constitution is clear: Congress is not a “co-equal” branch of the government. Congress, the most democratic part of the federal government, is the boss of the federal government. Congress gets to tell the executive what to do.
Running away from this arrangement has been bad for the republic. “Our legislature’s diminishment impairs our ability to make good policy,” Philip Wallach, my American Enterprise Institute colleague, argues convincingly in his book Why Congress. “Even more importantly, it threatens the vitality of our politics, contributing to the pervasive sense that our nation is coming apart at the seams.”
An executive that acts like a legislature undermines democracy and other conservative ideals, including limited government.
Having already ceded so much power to the executive, Congress ought to be even more jealous than before over its check on that branch — the advise-and-consent power.
The confirmation process has value for the administration. First, it might uncover undesirable traits about the nominees that Trump didn’t know when he picked them, thus possibly saving Trump from appointing an ineffective or hostile Cabinet official.
Second, hearings would give the qualified nominees a chance to demonstrate their fitness before they start the job. Consider Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary. Most Americans and most lawmakers know him as a television host. His service record and his years of discussing problems with the military are less known. A regular confirmation process would show that Hegseth has the chops for the job and thus put him in a stronger position when he takes charge of the department.
Skipping the confirmation process is akin to the Democrats’ skipping the whole nominating process for Vice President Kamala Harris.
That said, the threat of recess appointments should hang over the Senate in order to deter Democrats from unduly delaying an up-or-down vote on a nominee. The Senate always recesses in the summer, and Democrats might be less likely to delay a Trump pick if they know the person will be recess-appointed in a couple of months. If Democrats egregiously delay a crucial appointment, then Republicans might want to resort to a recess.
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However, recessing on Trump’s first day would be just another instance of the legislature handing over its power to the executive, which already has too much power.
Instead, Congress should actually do its job — vet the nominees and vote on them.