With controversial nominations and threats to push their appointments through, Donald Trump is already pushing Constitutional norms.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Last week, this weekend and more to come this week – what Trump insiders like to call shock and awe, a bunch of nominees for the new administration in quick succession, and some of them highly controversial. We have a look at the latest name in a few minutes. But first, let’s turn to NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So we’ve got a number of names, like Florida Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state and, as of last night, energy executive Chris Wright for Secretary of Energy. Why don’t you take it from there, giving us a little more?
LIASSON: Well, that’s right. He started out with some pretty mainstream announcements, like Marco Rubio for state, but then Trump announced three nominees that really made some of the senators in his own party shocked and horrified. And they were Pete Hegseth for defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Matt Gaetz for attorney general to run the Justice Department.
So I think if there was any shorthand title for this week, I would say it was, he wasn’t kidding. All during the campaign, we heard his surrogates say that Trump didn’t really want to use the Department of Justice to take revenge on his political opponents. He didn’t really want to purge the military of disloyal generals or undermine democratic institutions. But taken together, these three nominations show that he is serious about not just pursuing his grievance and revenge agenda but also bending these institutions and agencies to his will.
Remember, these are the three agencies that angered him the most in his first term. The Justice Department refused to help him overturn the 2020 election. Intelligence agencies concluded that Russia did try to help him win in 2016, and military leaders rejected his plans to use the military against protesters. So now that he’s back in the White House, he wants people leading these agencies who will carry out his agenda. And even if some of these nominees fail, he may end up with other people who will do what he wants.
RASCOE: Well, let’s pause for a moment and remind people what’s so controversial about these particular nominees.
LIASSON: Well, none of these three people has experience running large organizations like the Department of Defense or Justice or specific knowledge in these fields. And Tulsi Gabbard, for instance, is a Putin apologist. Matt Gaetz is someone who’s been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for drug abuse and having sex with underage women. Pete Hegseth is a veteran and a Fox News weekend host, and according to the Washington Post, he’s also been investigated for sexual assault.
So there’s been some pushback from some Republican senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski who say these people are not qualified. But other Republican senators say that they want to be deferential to the new president and they believe that presidents should get who they want to run executive branch agencies.
RASCOE: So when you talk about undermining – about the undermining of democratic institutions, it’s not just Trump naming controversial nominees. There’s also the question of what the Republican majority and the Senate decides to do with those names.
LIASSON: That’s right. Trump has presented these nominees to the Senate as a kind of take-it-or-leave-it proposition. The Senate has a constitutional responsibility to perform what’s called advice and consent, in other words, to approve or disapprove nominees to the executive branch. And Donald Trump is saying to the Senate, you can confirm my appointments. After all, you have a 53-to-47 vote majority. You have a cushion. You can lose three votes.
Or we can go through recess appointments, where there will be no ability for the Senate to question or vet or investigate the backgrounds and qualifications of these nominees. So he’s saying, if the Senate does agree to recess appointments, they will be, in effect, saying they are not a coequal branch of government. They will be ceding their power to the executive branch.
RASCOE: Well, OK. Look, I know we all took social studies, but when you start talking about recess appointments – it’s a little early on a Sunday morning. Some people may not be fully caffeinated, and some people may just be a little confused. What do you mean by recess appointment?
LIASSON: All right. The Constitution says that the Senate has the advice and consent role, but in emergency situations, when the Senate is not meeting, when they are in recess – and, of course, in the early days of the Republic, sometimes it took a long time to get to Washington by horse and buggy – the president was allowed to appoint people that would last through the next session.
So in other words, if Congress went into recess, if the Senate went into recess, Trump could appoint someone and they would serve until the end of 2026. Now, there are ways the Senate can resist that. They can stay in pro forma session, but there is also a theory that the president could actually force a recess. That’s never been tried. We don’t know what the Supreme Court would think about that.
And our founders created a system of broadly distributed power, checks and balances. They had a pretty jaundiced view of human nature. They wanted to make sure that if a leader was elected with what they would have called monarchical tendencies – they wouldn’t have said authoritarian – that that person couldn’t do a lot of damage because there were coequal branches of governments and checks and balances. Well, we’re going to see if the Republican Senate is willing to stand up for their constitutional prerogatives.
RASCOE: That’s NPR’s Mara Liasson. Mara, thank you so much.
LIASSON: You’re welcome.
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