Republican senators should immediately kneecap the nominations of former Reps. Tulsi Gabbard and especially Matt Gaetz for top spots in President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration.
House and Senate Republican leaders likewise should signal that they won’t allow Trump to install these two unfit characters through any backdoor method. Congress should not allow itself to go into “recess” in any way that enables Trump to put anybody into office without Senate approval.
My colleague Tom Rogan already explained why Gabbard has no business being head of the nation’s intelligence apparatuses.
“If Gabbard is approved,” Rogan justly writes, “Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin will have an ideological sympathizer holding the keys to the U.S. intelligence community crown jewels.”
An extreme leftist who endorsed socialist Bernie Sanders for president, Gabbard is so hostile to U.S. intelligence services that she advocated leniency for traitor Edward Snowden, who leaked huge amounts of classified U.S. information and then defected to Russia.
Gaetz is even worse. No matter what the technical legality, or lack thereof, of Gaetz’s hard partying with late-teenagers and his payments to a friend who admittedly was engaged in underage sex trafficking, those exploits alone make him what Alexander Hamilton meant when he warned against Senate approval of “unfit characters” to executive or judicial posts. For multiple reasons, conservative former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy called Gaetz an “unconfirmable” conspiracy theorist, and he is manifestly unqualified as a lawyer who barely ever practiced law, was disciplined at least three times by the Florida Bar, and was arrested on charges of driving under the influence.
Trump’s nomination of this despicable miscreant is an insult to the public and to the Constitution.
Indeed, Gaetz is so outrageously unfit that Republican senators should not even let him reach the starting gate. He is a rare nominee whose disqualifications are so well known that no hearing is needed to know that he merits rejection. Obviously, no Democratic senator will vote to confirm him, so it will take only four Republicans in the new Senate to block him. Ten times that many should announce, forthwith, that they will vote against him. After all, a president is supposed to make appointments with the “advice and consent” of the Senate. As Trump clearly did not consult with senators before announcing Gaetz, they should feel no obligation to give even the pretense of considering consent.
Even with too many politically pusillanimous people serving in the Senate, the odds are strong that neither Gabbard nor, especially, Gaetz will be confirmed. The bigger worry is that congressional leaders will fail to stop Trump from giving one or both of them a “recess appointment” that could put them in office for months or longer without being formally confirmed. Trump already is demanding that the Senate create the conditions, from among limited procedural options, for recess appointments across the board. Senators ought not to comply. To do so would both emasculate themselves and their own independent, constitutional authority and responsibility and also ill-serve all the constituents who voted for them to exercise those assigned powers.
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Conservative constitutional law scholar Ed Whelan reports backroom discussions that Trump is considering an extremely rare use of a constitutional clause that would, on “extraordinary occasions,” allow him to force both chambers of Congress to adjourn indefinitely. Such a move would amount to a dangerous aggrandizement of executive power. As Whelan notes, not even Trump could do this without the collaboration of House leaders. They should not comply. If they do, they will be complicit in directly undermining constitutional intent and in trashing the checks and balances that are essential safeguards against tyranny.
A plurality of voters elected Trump to be president, not emperor. All members of Congress who help enable his bent toward emperorship will betray their oaths of office. Their shame should be eternal.