Friday Talking Points -- The Clown Parade Continues

[ChrisWeigant]

The circus has come to town, and performing in the center ring this week was the teeny-tiny clown car which disgorged a continuing parade of clowns, each more outlandish than the last.

Or, to put things another way: get ready for lots more circus/clown metaphors in the very near future. It's really the only possible way to describe Donald Trump selecting his cabinet. But we'll get to the individual clowns in a moment, because first we've got to take a broader view of what Trump's up to here.

One of the hallmarks of the first Trump administration was not so much having big, public fights with Democrats, but rather having big, public fights within his own party. Trump's picks -- especially the most ridiculous ones -- are a huge gauntlet thrown down at the feet of the newly-Republican Senate and the new GOP Senate majority leader. Even before John Thune was chosen, Trump was issuing threats that the incoming majority leader had better support "recess appointments," if he know what was good for him.

Which leads us to a little constitutional review. The process for filling the cabinet (and plenty of other top jobs in any administration) is that the president nominates someone, the Senate investigates them and holds confirmation hearings, and then they vote whether to confirm the person or not. Here's how the Constitution puts it:

[The president] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.

Since this document was written when the fastest possible communication and/or transportation was basically limited to the speed at which a horse could run, they decided to provide another option, however. Back then, Congress wasn't in session year-round, and getting everyone to Washington was a major undertaking for many of them. So the Founders provided an alternative:

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Meaning, if Congress isn't in town, the president can still fill vacancies -- but these people will only hold their jobs until Congress is over (after the midterm elections for the incoming Congress right now, or in other words until the end of 2026).

However, for the past two decades, Congress basically never goes into recess. Oh sure, they flit off on vacation for weeks on end (let's not even talk about August, shall we?), but both houses of Congress hold pro forma sessions once every couple of days, where one of them (usually a representative or senator in near proximity to D.C., so as to not interrupt anyone's vacation time too much) gets up in front of a totally empty chamber. He or she gavels proceedings officially into session and then immediately gavels it back out again, turns the lights out, and goes home until the next time they've got to fake being in session (a few days down the road). This was done specifically to prevent a president (one of the opposing party, initially) from making recess appointments, since the chamber never officially goes into recess -- it merely keeps temporarily adjourning. This is a rather ridiculous legal fiction, but it's how things regularly happen now.

Barack Obama tried to defy this convention and make a recess appointment anyhow, but the Supreme Court ruled, in essence, that there was no official recess, therefore there could be no legal recess appointment. Congress would have to recess for around 10 days, the court said, before it would be considered a valid recess.

Trump wants this power back, even though he will have a pliant Republican majority in both houses. And he's threatening to make it happen on his own, if the new Senate majority leader doesn't knuckle under. Because there's another clause in the Constitution which addresses his powers that could soon become relevant:

[The president] may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses [of Congress], or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.

Call it an end-run to the initial end-run of recess appointments. This is an obscure clause in the Constitution and is not regularly used at all, but that's not going to matter one whit to Trump. So Trump can nominate anyone he feels like, then if the Senate balks at confirming them Trump can tell them to go into recess (so he can appoint the nominee anyway) -- and if the Senate balks at going into recess, then Trump can essentially force this to happen himself even without their consent.

This is the gauntlet Trump has thrown down in front of them, even before he dared them to be disloyal by nominating the most god-awful people imaginable to some of the most powerful positions in his administration. Trump is taunting the Senate Republicans, in other words: "Defy me and I'll do it anyway... and then I'll probably devote my life to destroying you."

So Republican senators who are sane enough not to want the likes of Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and R.F.K. Jr. running the country have a choice to make. Do they: (A) shoot down the nominee in the hopes of Trump withdrawing their name and making a less-insane nomination; (B) urge their leadership to just go into recess -- which would mean they wouldn't even have to vote on the odious nominee at all; or (C) force Trump to use an archaic clause of the Constitution that could precipitate a real Constitutional Crisis?

As you can see, for a Republican who is sane enough to balk at voting for total clowns, option (B) might start looking pretty good. That way, you don't tempt Trump's rage too much (by having to actually cast a vote against Trump), and at the same time if the nominee goes on to crash and burn in spectacular fashion, you can just wash your hands of the whole thing by saying: "Well, he was recess-appointed -- the Senate had nothing to do with it."

It's a power struggle and a blame game, all wrapped up into one. And at this point, nobody knows how it is all going to work out. But we suppose the safe money would be on "all the Republicans do exactly what Trump wants anyway," knowing how supine the entire party has become before the majesty of their Dear Leader.

Moving along to the individual clowns, one has to wonder if the chief lightning rod in all of this isn't really meant as some sort of feint. Donald Trump (no matter what he thinks in his own mind) is not known for playing three-dimensional chess. But he could have been talked into this scheme, because the decision was reportedly made on an airplane ride with the guy whispering in his ear.

When the plane landed, Trump announced to all and sundry that Representative Matt Gaetz (R - Gomorrah) would be his nominee for attorney general. Our personal reaction was: "What, was Bill Cosby not available?" What followed was rather odd, however, since Gaetz then immediately resigned his House seat. We later found out that this was done to preclude the House Ethics Committee from releasing a report (which probably would have happened today) detailing its investigation into Gaetz for (among other things) having sex with an underage girl and showing nude photos of his girlfriends on the House floor, apparently to anyone he bumped into. So the report would have made for some lively reading, that's for sure.

But Gaetz resigned before they could vote on releasing the report. So the House has no jurisdiction over him at all anymore. Which means they have to decide whether to release the report anyway, possibly send the report over to the Senate committee which will hold the confirmation hearing, or just bury the report forever. It should come as no surprise that they are leaning towards tossing the whole report down the memory hole.

Before we get to the Republican reaction to this nomination (which is also some lively reading), we do have to wonder if it is Gaetz playing some 3-D chess here. Reportedly, Gaetz has his eye on making a run for the Florida governor's office. If this has been his true ambition all along, then it certainly would make for an easier campaign if that pesky sex-and-drugs-and-depravity report was buried, wouldn't it? Resigning from the House might have been his only real goal this week, in other words, to avoid a possible expulsion or censure. To avoid all of that, Gaetz may have made a bargain with Trump to gracefully withdraw his name from consideration later, rather than force Trump to make good on his recess appointment threat. This would have the effect of leaving the report buried and clearing the way for Gaetz to make his governor's run.

From Trump's point of view, this would have some benefits as well. Once Gaetz withdrew his nomination, Trump could then appoint someone completely legally odious, but far better than Matt Gaetz -- say, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, for instance. Senate Republicans would probably fall all over themselves in relief to vote for such a candidate, and the crisis would be averted. Also, the drama around the Gaetz appointment would serve to lessen the drama surrounding some of his other woefully unqualified nominees. Kind of a win-win for Trump as well as Gaetz, when looked at this way.

Time will tell, of course. Maybe Trump will just force the Senate out of session and recess-appoint Gaetz after all. Who knows?

But moving on to the Republican reaction to all of this. We are going to save the best of these for the Talking Points, which this week is entirely devoted to Republican/conservative reactions to the appointment of Matt Gaetz. This builds to a big finish, an excerpt of an article written by Ben Domenech which starts off with: "Matt Gaetz is a sex-trafficking drug-addicted piece of shit," and ends with: "The man is absolutely vile. There are pools of vomit with more to offer the earth than this STD-riddled testament to the failure of fallen masculinity." This is coming from a rightwing member of the media, mind you.

As for the rest of the picks, Michael Waldman (president of the Brennan Center for Justice) summed it all up best with: "These are so appalling they're a form of performance art."

This strikes to the essence of the matter, since a second Trump presidency -- just like the first -- will essentially be performance art from beginning to end.

The week started off calmly enough, with Trump naming the first woman to be his White House chief of staff (the woman who just ran his campaign), and Senator Marco Rubio to be secretary of State. These were Trump loyalists, but also considered serious people who could easily be confirmed for the jobs.

Then Trump got creative. He named Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to head up his immigration policies, which means it wasn't just campaign rhetoric, they will indeed start rounding people up as soon as they can manage. Kristi Noem was nominated to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which also fits in with this plan.

He nominated two very pro-oil guys to deregulate everything in sight: Doug Burgum to Interior and Lee Zeldin for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Then came the real fireworks. Trump nominated, in quick succession, A Fox News host to run the Pentagon as the secretary of Defense, Tulsi Gabbard to run all the intelligence services, Matt Gaetz as attorney general, and R.F.K. Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

None are remotely qualified for these jobs, it bears pointing out. All seem to have significant (and highly embarrassing) baggage. In a world with sane Republicans running the United States Senate, none of them would have a snowball's chance in Hell of being confirmed. But, as we all know, we don't live in that world.

It was reported today that Trump's pick for Defense, Pete Hegseth, had a sexual assault complaint lodged against him with the police a few years ago. So there's that -- and it's only been a few days. Wonder what else might shake out in the coming days....

Tulsi Gabbard is a total nutjob who has cozied up to the enemies and adversaries of America in multiple ways. She has zero -- that's zero -- experience with intelligence matters. And yet she's been nominated to be the director of national intelligence. Because Trump also liked her performances on Fox News, assumably.

And R.F.K. Jr. is in a class by himself, when it comes to nutjobbery. He stands out from the clown crowd as King of the Clowns. In fact, his looniness is so well-known that we don't even have to run it all down again, right? Brain worm? Taking roadkill home for fun (and dinner)? Vaccine conspiracy theorist? These all ring a bell? Thought so....

If confirmed, Bobby Junior will be in charge of not just all those departments responsible for fighting pandemics and other deadly diseases, he will also be in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. And Obamacare. Those should be frightening thoughts. He's already threatening mass firings and plenty of fringe ideas for the nation's health.

And we're not done yet. Trump has only filled somewhere around half of his cabinet. There are other important jobs to fill (like secretary of the Treasury, just for one) that he's still mulling over. Which means next week might be as appalling as this one was.

One thing worth mentioning before we move on, here. Trump is a master at flooding the zone. He is such an unrelenting firehose of scandal and idiocy and bomb-throwing that it winds up diluting each one of them. You might describe this tactic as: "There's only so much outrage to go around." Just when the media and sane Republicans were all reacting in shock and horror to Tulsi Gabbard's nomination, Trump nominated Gaetz. In the ensuing frenzy (of more shock and horror), Gabbard was all but forgotten. This is the way it works. By week's end, people are only concentrating on the worst of Trump's excesses. All the smaller-bore ones then sneak through unscathed, at least for the time being.

Our advice to everyone is to get used to it. Because this is going to be what the next four years is like. Come Friday, we won't even remember the scandals from Monday, or the previous weekend. They will be lost in time, paling in significance to the newer outrages.

Trump knows this tactic works for him. His focus is on winning each day's news cycle (no matter what he has to do to achieve this), and it makes it exhausting to keep up. So as we said, get used to it (all over again).





We have to hand this week's Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award to Representative and now Senator-Elect Ruben Gallego, for defeating Kari Lake in the Arizona Senate race. Lake, true to form, has not conceded the race yet, and there may be a recount.

Assuming it doesn't change anything, though, Gallego will enter the Senate to replace Kyrsten Sinema, which will be a welcome relief for Democrats everywhere.

But we are giving the MIDOTW award to Gallego not for running a winning campaign and not for replacing a corporatist Democratic obstructionist, but simply for beating Kari Lake. The Republican Senate is going to be hard enough to take as it is, but at least now we won't have to put up with her craziness on a regular basis.

[Congratulate Representative and Senator-Elect Ruben Gallego on his House contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.]





This is a holdover from the election. Which is actually good news, since it means no Democrat really did anything massively disappointing this week.

The blame game in the Democratic Party is not over yet, not by a long shot. There will be some sort of autopsy of the 2028 election and what it means for the party going forward, and our guess is that plenty of fingers will be pointed during that process.

But one thing has stood out in all of this that we find we fully agree with. Because we don't primarily blame Kamala Harris or Joe Biden for Donald Trump's win, instead we apportion the lion's share of the blame to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

He was appointed to the job as a consolation prize for having his Supreme Court nomination ignored by Mitch McConnell, plain and simple. But he was never a good fit for the job, being primarily a judge, not a prosecutor.

Garland just flat-out failed, when it came to dealing with Donald Trump. Garland waited two years (!) before really even beginning an investigation into Trump, and that wasted time proved to be fatal to any effort to hold him accountable. It took Liz Cheney and the rest of the January 6th committee to shame him into it, in fact.

Imagine, if you will, an alternate world where Jack Smith had been appointed special counsel a couple months after Garland took office. Trump could have tried all his delaying tactics and his endless appeals, and the Supreme Court could have done what it could to protect him and all of that -- and there would still be two years left to go. Trials could have actually happened before the next presidential election. Trump could have been tried and convicted and imprisoned by now.

Or not -- there's no guarantee what a jury will do. But at least we would have had the time for it all to have actually happened, instead of it being interrupted by the election. And that is all Merrick Garland's fault, plain and simple.

So for denying justice by aiding and abetting Trump delaying justice, we have to say not just for this week but for the entirety of President Joe Biden's term, Merrick Garland was our Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week. Or possibly ...Of The Past Four Years.

Either way, history won't be kind to Garland, that's our guess at this point.

[Contact Attorney General Merrick Garland via the official Justice Department contact page, to let him know what you think of his actions.]




Volume 775 (11/15/24)

We're going all in on Matt Gaetz reactions for this week's Talking Points, all from Republicans and conservatives. In fact, we had an embarrassment of riches to choose from, so we didn't even include Republicans commenting on whether Gaetz would actually be confirmed or not (Senator Susan Collins: "I'm certain there will be a lot of questions raised at his hearing"... Representative Max Miller: "I think he has a zero percent shot of getting through the Senate"... Senator Thom Tillis: "I'm sure it'll make for a popcorn-eating confirmation hearing"... [iet cetera].).

We also didn't have room for the many Democratic reactions to the picks, but we have to include at the very least the funniest one, from Representative Eric Swalwell:

To the president, I say, "No, seriously, who is your pick for attorney general?"

But it's one of those weeks where all Democrats really needed to do was to stand back and watch the Republican Party attack each other. So here are the best Republican reactions to the nomination of Matt Gaetz to lead the Justice Department (that investigated him for sex-trafficking an underage teen).



Unserious

We begin rather sedately, with Senator Lisa Murkowski's reaction to the news of the Gaetz nomination:

I don't think it's a serious nomination for the attorney general.

She later added, less sedately:

If I wanted to make a joke, maybe I would say now I'm waiting for George Santos to be named.

Worst ever!

Next, here is John Bolton, who served as Trump's national security advisor in his first term. Bolton was initially interviewed after the news of Tulsi Gabbard's nomination, where he called it the "worst cabinet-level appointment in history." When the Gaetz pick was announced, Bolton had to revise and extend this remark.

With [Donald Trump's] announcement of Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence, he's sending a signal that we have lost our mind when it comes to collecting intelligence. Up until a few hours ago, I would have said that was the worst cabinet appointment in recent American history. Of course, since Matt Gaetz's nomination, he clearly has taken the lead on that score.

What'd I just step in?

Representative Max Miller went for a gooey sort of metaphor:

[Matt Gaetz] is literally worse than the gum on the bottom of my shoe

Ty Cobb knocks it out of the park

Ty Cobb, who also used to work for the Trump administration (as White House attorney), had a few things to say as well.

[Donald Trump nominating Matt Gaetz] is just a shocking event, and intentionally so. I mean, he's a disrupter, Trump is. But Matt Gaetz is just simply unqualified, both academically, professionally, ethically, morally, and experientially.... He has no business of being in this conversation.... Just not a serious choice.... [His nomination is a] "Fuck you!" to America.

You've got to be...

Representative Mike Simpson had perhaps the most-quoted reaction to the news, which he obviously had just heard. It's a sort of double-take, since he seemed to realize in the middle of his answer what the possible ramifications could turn out to be, which makes it all the more amusing. When asked by a reporter if he thought Gaetz had "the character and experience to be attorney general," Simpson "stared at them incredulously, waited six seconds to answer, and then said with a laugh:"

Are you shitting me, that you asked that question? No. But hell, you'll print that and now I'll be investigated.

It is to laugh?

As a counterbalance to the Federalist Society meeting in Washington, the rival Society For The Rule Of Law held an event this week. Former Representative Barbara Comstock addressed the gathering, calling the Gaetz nomination "absurd" and mentioning both him and Tulsi Gabbard said Trump was filling his cabinet with "Putinists and pedophiles." But that wasn't the best line of the night. George Conway had a joke for the crowd that we've heard others (on late-night comedy) also make, because it's such an obvious one. Here's how Conway put it:

[Matt Gaetz] couldn't make it here tonight because he had a hot date. It's called a "recess appointment."

Tell us what you really think, Ben!

Our pièce-de-résistance this week comes from Ben Domenech, who was described by HuffPost as: "a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, [who] has gone from wunderkind blogger to a regular Fox News guest, as a co-founder of The Federalist and editor-at-large of The Spectator World." Sterling conservative cred, in other words. He reacted to the news of the Gaetz nomination on Substack, in a post titled: "Matt Gaetz Is A Vile Sex Pest And Any Senator Who Votes For Him Owns That." As expected with such a title, Domenech does not hold back or mince his words in any way whatsoever. The whole thing is absolutely breathtaking to read, in fact. Here is just the first paragraph, to give you a taste (which we present completely unedited, although we were indeed tempted to correct a few grammatical nits):

I realize that we are occasionally given to hyperbole about the untoward nature of politicians, but let me be clear: Matt Gaetz is a sex trafficking drug addicted piece of shit. He is abhorrent. His eyes are permanently rimmed with the red rings of chemical boosters. In person, he smells like overexposed Axe Body Spray and stale Astroglide. The fact that he boasted on the floor to multiple colleagues in the House of Representatives of his methods of crushing Viagra and high test Red Bull to maintain his erection through his orgiastic evenings is perhaps the least offensive of his many crimes against womanhood and Christian faith. The man has less principles than your average fentanyl addicted hobo. He likes them underage and he's not ashamed about it. Matt Gaetz isn't just your average extreme Florida MAGA Man, he's a hypocritical ass with the worst Botox money can buy, pursuing an ever-thinner nose and higher cheekbones at every opportunity like a Real Housewife gone mad for fillers. Every Republican in Washington has an opinion about Matt Gaetz, and 99 percent of those opinions are "Keep Matt Gaetz away from my wife/daughter/friend and anyone I care about." He is a walking genital, warts included as a bonus. If I was merely attempting to count the number of women I know who have had bad experiences with Matt Gaetz, I would run out of fingers and toes. If you vote for him to be the Attorney General of the United States, you don't just need your head examined, you need to be committed to a mental institution. The man is absolutely vile. There are pools of vomit with more to offer the earth than this STD-riddled testament to the failure of fallen masculinity.

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
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