Before the filibuster was eliminated for most presidential nominees, the White House needed to negotiate with the other party to assure that their candidates were at least minimally acceptable. Without a handful of votes from the other side, there was no way to get their people confirmed. President Trump would have been laughed out of town if he suggested he might select Herman Cain and Stephen Moore to serve on the Federal Reserve board. In retrospect, the old system often saved the Senate leaders of the president’s own party from having to play the heavy. Ridiculous nominees were generally rejected internally within the White House vetting process for lack of viability. If they somehow slipped through and were sent to the Senate, the opposition party played the bad guy by rejecting them.
This system has now been upended. The Republicans in the Senate have no cover anymore if they want to deny the president a nomination. The solution is to tell the White House in advance that they should not make these nominations because they’ll be rejected.
Senate Republican leaders are sending a message to members troubled by President Donald Trump’s controversial Federal Reserve picks: Speak up.
During Tuesday afternoon’s Senate Republican lunch, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell advised senators concerned about Trump’s selection of former presidential candidate and pizza executive Herman Cain and conservative economic commentator Stephen Moore to share their views with the White House now, before Trump officially moves forward with the nominations, a source familiar with the remarks told CNN.
The basic conversation here is pretty straightforward. A Republican senator or his or her staffer calls the White House chief of staff or the congressional liaison. They tell them that if they go forward with a nomination, they cannot count on their vote. If enough Republican senators send this message to the White House, they can dissuade the nomination from going forward. The benefit to the White House is that they can avoid embarrassment. This is also a benefit to the people who are under consideration for the jobs. The benefit for the Republican senators is that they can buck their own president quietly and behind the scenes and won’t come under pressure to back someone who is manifestly unfit for the position.
You can see how uneasy the Senate Republicans are about defying the president.
In hallway interviews with nearly 20 Republican senators on Tuesday, most were reluctant to candidly discuss Cain’s potential nomination. Many said they hadn’t heard the days-old news that Trump was planning to select him. Others opted to withhold comment, while some expressed vague reservations.
Most of them are uncomfortable even discussing these nominations. Some responses lack candor and others are outright disingenuous. They want to issue to disappear, but they are the only ones who can make the issue disappear. Most of all, they’d like to avoid being put in this position in the first place:
Republicans are in a slightly better position to confirm contentious appointees than they were before the 2018 midterm elections, with their new majority of 53, but they can still afford to lose only a few votes before any nomination would be doomed.
That concern prompted Sen. John Cornyn of Texas on Tuesday to warn the White House to consult in advance with Senate leaders on nominations like these.
The Senate is supposed to provide their advice and consent to presidential nominations, and certainly the hearing process can give them that opportunity. But it’s better politics to do most of the vetting prior to making any announcements. The president clearly expects the Senate Republicans to approve anyone he nominates because it is now technically within their power to approve people with no Democratic support.
Many warned that the Senate would break if the filibuster was weakened or eliminated, and here is an example of a worst case scenario. By blocking acceptable nominations during the Obama administration just to slow down business in the Senate, Mitch McConnell forced the Democrats to find a work-around. Now the Republicans are having difficulty rejecting ludicrous candidates because the White House sees no reason not to send them forward.
Seems to be working just fine. They don’t want to take the votes because they don’t want to make themselves politically vulnerable. That’s not “breaking” anything, it’s introducing some democratic accountability rather than hiding behind the opposition party.
Well, Trump is largely going to do what Trump wants to do. If, by some amazing and rare happenstance, a Senator does happen to speak up and express concern about a potential nominee, Trump will simply look on that as confirmation that he is doing the right thing. Remember, he came down that escalator proclaiming that he was going to blow up the processes that had undergirded our democracy since its inception. And how he judges the qualifications of anyone is completely detached from how it has been done by both parties since day one or our republic.
They can stand around in their little circles in the halls of Congress and grumble to each other all they want about how uncomfortable this makes them, but the simple fact is, they are going to give him everything he wants. That is exactly what Mitch McConnell has designed by virtue of everything that he has done. This is how things run now. It is pretty much a dictatorship when it comes to anyone who has to pass through the Senate process. They have totally abdicated their constitutional responsibilities and have decided that they are now nothing more than a rubber stamp for a crazy, right wing demagogue.
I’m not sure that we will ever get back to anything resembling near normal, as far as the processes and procedures that have managed to keep our three branches of goverment largely balanced, and checking each other’s perceived excesses. This is the way the Republican Party functions now, and they cannot change. The political costs that will be exacted, in perpetuity, are simply too high. Of course, when the pendulum swings back and Democrats hold control, there will be a mad rush to find ways to put this genie back in the bottle. But the fact is, we have now “gone there” with the outright rejection of the principles and good faith which has sustained our small “d” democracy. The red line has been erased, and this is the place, at a minimum, where we will go every single time that the Republicans hold power. And the chance that in the future we will go to even more horrific places has been increased a hundred fold by what has happened since 2016. I am not sure we can resurrect and reconstruct the system that existed prior to Donald Trump.
I agree. My official prediction is they will be nominated and confirmed.
I’ll point out that Trump almost always caves when he is actually challenged. You know he’s feeling particularly humiliated when he pretends it was Obama’s idea all along.
But they had no problem approving so many awful individuals to the federal bench.
Hodge podge of Federalist Society hacks who will legislate from the bench to bring back Lochner is someone else’s problem in the future. And that future reckoning can continue to be delayed because of the judges.
But federal reserve nominees who are nothing but political hacks who know nothing about what they do, and might screw things up in a material way? Whole next level of “Cult” they’re not prepared for.
In Trump’s mind he’s a King and everyone in congress owes fealty to him. He is also insane, which means when he puts forward a ridiculous nominee the candidate is as good as confirmed; his insanity won’t allow consideration of anything else, nor will his fragile ego. For the republicans, dealing with Obama and the games they played with him was a walk in the park compared to dealing with the idiot king and his moronic hordes.
The GOP brand is supposedly toughness, but they’re cowards. The thought of having to oppose, even in private, the Idiot King and risk the wrath of his powerful Beam of Stupidity, Twitter, is truly frightening to these “patriots.”
We are living in the early stages of a typical Third World dictatorship. More and more I find that book, The Emperor, about the downfall of Hailie Selassie explains right wing politics here in this country better than any other source.
Everybody wonders why Trump keeps hiring and then firing his ministers. It’s incomprehensible because we reject the very idea that our highest civil servants ought to be hired goons who have no higher purpose than to show their loyalty to the despot. We don’t even want a despot ruling over us.
But, the idea that absolute personal loyalty to the monarch overrides any possible consideration of competence, honesty or integrity is absolutely central to any dictatorship or Empire in history. Stalin used to act the same way.
He would do or say something so outrageous that people would be bound to object or complain that the things the leader wanted were stupid or impossible. He would watch carefully to see who would salute and immediately demonstrate his loyalty and who would try and reason or object or argue. And he would get rid of all those who thought reality ought to triumph over the will of monarchs.
And yet we always act surprised when Trump acts exactly like every other would be tyrant and dictator in history.
There’s a difference between outrage and surprise.
It’s ridiculous to blame this disfunction on the elimination of the filibuster. The problem is that Republicans view Donald Trump as their boss, not simply the current leader of the party. They refuse to challenge him on anything, even when they know it will be catastrophic, like the recent shutdown, which Paul Ryan enabled as a parting gift to Trump in his last act as Speaker.
Most Senators will not even be on the ballot in 2020. Some will never be on the ballot again. No-one is going to lose an election because they nixed the nomination of Herman Cain to a position on the Federal Reserve Board.
Trump is already caving.
The sole point of Cain’s nomination.