Eye-opening stuff from the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Ed Whelan at The Washington Post:
President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to turn the Constitution’s appointment process for Cabinet officers on its head. If what I’m hearing through the conservative legal grapevine is correct, he might resort to a cockamamie scheme that would require House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to play a critical role. Johnson can and should immediately put an end to this scheme.
Yes, the president's power to make recess appointments is provided for in the Constitution, but Hamilton regarded it as “nothing more than a supplement” to the “general mode of appointing officers of the United States” and is to used “in cases to which the general method was inadequate.”
Here's what seems to be getting cooked up:
It appears that the Trump team is working on a scheme to allow Trump to recess-appoint his Cabinet officers. This scheme would exploit an obscure and never-before-used provision of the Constitution (part of Article II, Section 3) stating that “in Case of Disagreement” between the houses of Congress, “with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,” the president “may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”
Under this scheme, it appears that the House would adopt a concurrent resolution that provided for the adjournment of both the House and the Senate. If the Senate didn’t adopt the resolution, Trump would purport to adjourn both houses for at least 10 days (and perhaps much longer). He would then use the resulting intrasession recess to appoint Gaetz and other Cabinet nominees.
Ten years ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia labeled the president’s recess-appointment power an “anachronism” because “modern forms of communication and transportation” make the Senate always available to consider nominations. Along with three of his colleagues, Scalia also argued that the president’s power to make recess appointments is limited to intersession recesses and does not apply to the intrasession recess that the Trump scheme would concoct. The justice, who died in 2016, would be aghast at the notion that a president could create an intrasession recess for the purpose of bypassing the Senate approval process for nominations.
Whelan conclude with what is obvious to anyone with a working moral compass: that Speaker Johnson must make clear that flimsily justified recesses ain't happening.
Yeah, yeah, I found the first few appointments interesting (I absolutely love Marco Rubio's hallway exchange about his views on a Gaza ceasefire with a "peace activist"), but about the time the Very Stable Genius got to prolific procreator (with several different women) Pete Hegseth, I had questions. Then came Tulsi Gabbard, she of the 2017 visit to Syria and some strong evidence of coziness with China and Russia. Then came Matt Gaetz.
It's pretty clear that the VSG intends to surround himself with a covey of yes-people as quickly as possible so the machinery is in place for any further damage to Mr. Madison's document he feels he needs to do.
