On the menu today: Well, it was nice while it lasted. With selections like attorney-general nominee Matt Gaetz and secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump has guaranteed that the first weeks, if not months, of his second term will be spent on difficult confirmation fights in the Senate, eating up valuable time and political capital. If you wanted to hit the ground running and get as much done in that ideal window of a president’s first 100 days as possible, these are not the moves you should make.
Contents: One Cabinet, Some Assembly Required
Yesterday, my Three Martini Lunch podcast co-host Greg Corombos put his finger on why an incoming president probably shouldn’t pick the most controversial, bomb-throwing, in-your-face, widely disliked, and combative options for his cabinet.
Yes, “personnel is policy,” and as I wrote earlier in the week, summoning karmic retribution, presuming they’re qualified and scandal-free, a president should get the cabinet appointees that he wants.
But like all presidents, Trump wants to hit the ground running, and a controversial cabinet pick inevitably endures a much slower-moving confirmation process — and if a nominee is rejected, then the process starts all over again with the second choice. Those long-desired reforms at the Departments of Justice or Health and Human Services won’t really get rolling until there’s a cabinet secretary in place.
At noon on Inauguration Day, the clock starts ticking on the president’s first 100 days. A McKinsey report welcoming the Biden administration noted, “The first 100 days of a new federal executive’s term are crucial. Actions taken during this time will be heavily scrutinized throughout the government and in the media and, most important, looked upon by agency and administration colleagues, stakeholders, community leaders, and US citizens as an indication of what to expect and how best to partner with the appointee.” The 100 days aren’t some arbitrary deadline; they’re the best window of opportunity that a new president has for enacting his top agenda items. By late spring, inertia starts to settle back in, and other events and crises will divert attention, time, and resources.
(Yesterday, Charlie Kirk threatened, “John Thune is now Senate majority leader. If he does not support President Trump in these next 30 to 45 days to fill President Trump’s cabinet, we will remove him.” The new Senate that Thune will be majority leader in doesn’t get sworn into office until January 3, 2025, which is 49 days from now.)
George W. Bush had his entire cabinet confirmed in twelve days; Donald Trump and Barack Obama had all of their cabinet secretaries confirmed in 97 and 98 days, respectively, and the Senate approved all of President Joe Biden’s 15 cabinet statutory nominations in 61 days.
There will be 53 Republican senators in the chamber in January, no matter what Bob Casey thinks, or Bucks County commissioner Diane Marseglia thinks, despite her contention, “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws any time they want.” (Marseglia was voting to ignore the Pennsylvania supreme-court ruling that mail ballots must have a legible and accurate date to be counted.)
If three Republican senators vote against a nominee, Vice President-elect J. D. Vance will break the tie, and the nominee will be confirmed. But if four GOP senators vote “no,” the nominee goes down. Trump has a little wiggle room, but not much.
Right now, barring some revelation of scandal or a disastrous confirmation hearing, Pete Hegseth will probably be confirmed as secretary of Defense. Tulsi Gabbard will probably be confirmed as director of National Intelligence, although as noted yesterday, she may find herself disappointed with what the job actually entrails, and how little power the ODNI has to shape the budget and priorities.
(On Joy Reid’s MSNBC program, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fumed, “Let’s be very clear, a Tulsi Gabbard nomination is a pro-war nomination, globally, point blank, period.” This is like arguing Trump isn’t erratic enough, or that Kamala Harris doesn’t laugh enough, or that Joe Biden is too young to remain president. Gabbard’s been an odd duck from the start, and may well be a bad fit for the job. But the bizarro-world contention that Gabbard is pro-war is another demonstration that AOC, so beloved by the progressives, is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.)
But the outlook for attorney-general nominee Matt Gaetz and secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is darkly cloudy at best.
This morning, the Wall Street Journal quotes North Dakota Republican senator Kevin Cramer saying he doesn’t think Gaetz would have the votes to be approved by the Judiciary Committee, much less to be confirmed by the full Senate. The Journal asked multiple Republican senators, and “estimates ranged from more than a dozen Republican ‘no’ votes to more than 30.” Not great, Bob!
Trump had plenty of smart, tough, experienced, loyal, and scandal-free options for the position of attorney general. Reportedly, the short list included Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey, former White House attorney Mark Paoletta, and former acting attorney general Matt Whitaker. Greg recommended former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who served as deputy secretary of Homeland Security and director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under President Trump.
It will not surprise you I would recommend another experienced prosecutor who has written at length about what ails the Department of Justice and who has keen sense for separating legitimate complaints about corruption and mismanagement from the conspiracy theories and frivolous nonsense.
But instead, Trump picked Gaetz, who will require spending enormous amounts of political capital to defend, assuming he can be confirmed at all. And it can’t be emphasized enough — protracted confirmation fights take up valuable time. Does Trump want his attorney general starting on the job in February, or in April?
The editors of NR do not mince words:
Donald Trump nominated Representative Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.), an unqualified toady, to the nation’s top law-enforcement office. And, in the blink of an eye, Gaetz resigned from the House to, apparently, force the shutdown of an ethics investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, obstruction, and other unsavory conduct — misconduct allegations over which Gaetz narrowly escaped being indicted by the same Justice Department Trump would have him lead.
To be sure, Gaetz was not charged. He has denied any wrongdoing. And allegations, even colorable ones, are not evidence. Nevertheless, the standards of fitness for an office of high public trust — and it doesn’t get much higher than attorney general — are considerably loftier than whether one manages to evade criminal prosecution. This puzzling nomination should be swiftly rejected by the Senate for the most basic of reasons: Gaetz is unfit.
Meanwhile, our Phil Klein lays out the myriad reasons conservatives should reject RFK Jr. and demand a serious-minded conservative running HHS instead:
If the Senate confirms President-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of health and human services, it would be a monumental disaster.
A lot of attention in the coming weeks will be focusing on RFK Jr.’s opposition to vaccines and other oddball stances such as his warnings about fluoride in the water, which is to be expected. After all, in this role he would be put in charge of the FDA, CDC, and NIH.
But let us not forget that HHS is the largest department in the federal government, with more than one out of every four dollars in the budget flowing through its doors. Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are all controlled by HHS, and Obamacare delegated a massive amount of regulatory power to the secretary.
It is through HHS that Republican presidents have the ability to influence abortion policy, but RFK Jr. earlier this year defended the right to “full-term abortion.” After backtracking, he still said he supported abortion until viability.
HHS would also be the agency through which Republicans could try to loosen the government’s regulatory grip on American health care, but in RFK Jr., Trump has named somebody who has envisioned a sort of single-payer system akin to the government-run public option that was rejected during the Obamacare debate for being a step toward socialized medicine.
A presidential cabinet is not good venue for larger-than-life personalities, bombastic speakers, or controversy-courting characters who love to be in front of the cameras. These are primarily administrative jobs. You’d be surprised how often a president’s cabinet appointees end up in disagreements with the White House staff. (From a Brookings report: “President Obama’s cabinet secretaries did not appreciate chief of staff Rahm Emanuel treating them as his ‘minions.’”) And remember, for Trump’s team, they’re taking on a hostile established bureaucracy with decades of practice at dragging their feet and slow-walking reforms.
Forget all the other reasons why Gaetz and Kennedy would be bad fits at their departments. Do you actually think they have the discipline, focus, and useful experience to accomplish one of the toughest tasks in government, which is reforming an entrenched bureaucracy?
ADDENDA: Next week, on Wednesday, November 21, at noon, I will be speaking at the LeMieux Center for Public Policy at Palm Beach Atlantic University, talking about the home front, Taiwan, Ukraine, and everything else after the election.
While I’m in Florida, I’ll also be speaking to some friends and supporters of the National Review Institute, so . . . if you’re not already supporting NRI, check it out!
Thanks to the nearly 600 people who have already contributed to our ongoing webathon.
Finally, I am scheduled to appear on Abby Phillips’s program on CNN this evening at 10 p.m. Eastern.