All the right people are angry.
This is what MAGA will tell you when you point out that President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is an unhinged authoritarian crank.
If you point out that Kennedy is a chemtrail truther who believes the water supply is turning children gay, MAGA will ask you if he’s any worse than “Rachel Levine” or Anthony Fauci. Probably not, no.
And if you mention that Kennedy has neither the credentials nor expertise to offer anyone advice on their health, much less make national policy, people like Elon Musk will point out that Democrats believe men could be pregnant. That’s also true.
But none of these contentions are arguments for Kennedy. A man who celebrates the notion of climate lockdowns doesn’t become a stronger candidate because Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra is also an extremist. Even if we found out Fauci was the devil himself, it wouldn’t erase Kennedy’s lifetime of crackpottery. It’s not merely that Kennedy possesses no experience for the job. It’s that most of the things he believes are dangerously untethered from reality.
Do Democrats deserve to be mocked? Of course. Do they deserve Kennedy? Probably. We shouldn’t forget the public health fearmongering, lying, and manipulation used to control people during the COVID-19 outbreak. Shutdowns didn’t only inflict profound harm on children. They were tyrannical. The public health mandarins have never had a reckoning.
But if “follow the science” morphs into “follow the science fiction,” as it certainly will with Kennedy, we aren’t going to solve the crisis of trust in public health. Kennedy wants the HHS to be far more involved in our lives, not less.
Anyway, Trump has the right to pick anyone he likes, and the Senate has the duty to vote down any irresponsible and ridiculous nominees. It’s why advice and consent exists.
The Senate also has a responsibility to vote against nominees it suspects would show more deference to the president than the Constitution. I’m sure nominating former House backbencher Matt Gaetz for attorney general makes all the right people angry. Congrats on that. Gaetz’s greatest accomplishment in nearly 15 years of sponging off taxpayers was exacting personal revenge against GOP leadership for allowing an ethics investigation to conclude.
Gaetz isn’t in the running for White House press secretary. He’s running for the top law enforcement position in the country. He’s shown neither the disposition nor skill for the job. The only discernible reason for his nomination is an enduring loyalty to the incoming president.
In a normal year, Kennedy and Gaetz would have to answer a slew of awkward questions in a Senate confirmation hearing. Which is probably why Trump has reportedly cooked up a scheme to bypass the Senate and recess-appoint his Cabinet.
Recess appointments, which, the late Justice Antonin Scalia noted, are an “anachronism,” were intended to let the executive branch make appointments when Congress was out of session. In the 18th century, elected officials were compelled to travel hundreds of miles by carriage to go home or escape Washington, D.C., during smallpox outbreaks — which, to be fair, may well make a comeback under Kennedy.
This isn’t some esoteric debate over the spirit of the law. Trump is engineering a fake recess, with the help of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) in the House, so his nominees can circumvent senatorial scrutiny. It is an attack on the separation of powers. It is the kind of executive abuse Republicans would rightly be howling in indignation over if the other party was doing it.
Whenever MAGA is itching to blow up some norm, it will argue that Democrats would surely do the same if they had the chance. Why should the GOP unilaterally disarm, they ask? Even if this were true, the GOP claims it is a defender of the constitutional order. But maybe ask yourself if it’s worth destroying 250 years of tradition for the likes of Kennedy and Gaetz.
Because “making all the right people angry” isn’t any great accomplishment. Virtually everything makes leftists angry. What would really bring a reckoning to constitutionalists, in the long run, are ruthlessly competent administrators who will dismantle the stultified culture in these agencies and reinvent them. Of course, Trump could back an avowed communist to run the Federal Reserve, and his supporters would quickly concoct ways to justify it. Presidents have lots of leeway on the Cabinet. But a loyalty oath shouldn’t be the only qualification.
Indeed, the best argument against Trump’s nominations isn’t from the Left or from the institutionalists but from those who want real change. Competence is perhaps the most undervalued feature of modern politics.
Take Florida as an example. Former President Barack Obama handily won the state twice. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) barely took the governorship in 2018. Since then, because of stubbornly capable governance, the state has become a leading destination for Americans and increasingly red. Trump won Florida by a larger margin than Vice President Kamala Harris won New York. It’s not just partisanship. It’s the stable governance.
The nominee for the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, for instance, is an unapologetic champion of American fossil fuel production. Unlike most nominees for the position over the past century, he has both expertise and experience. Wright has never served in a government position, nor is he some mindless partisan crony. Wright is an innovator who, as Trump noted, helped launch the shale revolution. Most voters have never heard of Wright, but it is more than likely he will help them in ways more than the picks that garner the most attention.
Now, it is obvious that many Trump supporters value a certain aesthetic and tonal quality in their people. One of the reasons Gaetz is the right man, says Musk, is that he has an “axe to grind,” as if the job was about revenge, not dispensing justice equally. It’s a shame because there are plenty of capable people, as we’ve seen in Trump’s other picks, who could do these jobs.
Kennedy and Gaetz, on the other hand, will “break things,” I’m told. Many self-important MAGA social media influencers fantasize about the FBI or the Justice Department being abolished. It’s not going to happen. This is a sprawling organization with 115,000 employees. You can break it and shrink it, but you also have to fix it, or it will immediately return to form when you lose the next presidential election.
Too bad, MAGA tells me, Trump has a “mandate” from the people. But, of course, mandates aren’t a real thing, either. Every incoming administration imagines it’s been given a magical ability to implement an agenda unilaterally. We don’t have oligarchs with time limits, even if they have captured overwhelming wins, which Trump has not. We have three branches of government. And one of them is empowered to reject the president’s Cabinet picks no matter how people voted for the president.
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Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the incoming majority leader, has already extended deference by promising Trump his nominees will get timely votes. That’s a completely normal thing to do.
And that’s all he needs to do.