How Trump can get his way on his dangerous cabinet

It is my unfortunate job to do this to you. We have to talk about the Senate, the institution created by the founders to be a "cooling saucer" to the rabble-rousing "hot tea" of the commoners in the House and a necessary check to a potential despotic chief executive. Nice idea, if you can keep it.

The first test of that has already been set in the parade of horrors convicted felon Donald Trump has put forward for his cabinet: sex pest Matt Gaetz for Attorney General; wormy-brained, anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. for head of Health and Human Services; and alleged cultist and Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard to as intelligence chief, to name just a few. Trump has already made it clear he wants no obstacles from his GOP Senate lackeys, writing Monday that he expects the Senate to give him his cabinet without giving Democrats or squeamish Republicans the chance to mount opposition by allowing him recess appointments.

The constitution does give the president the power to do that, to install nominees when the Congress isn't in session to approve them. That was likely an "in case of emergency" consideration for the founders—what if the Secretary of War keeled over while the Senators were scattered out about the place, days' rides away from the capital? They put limits on those appointments, however—they could only last through the current congressional session, a maximum of two years.

As with everything Senate-wise, recess appointment power has become a political cudgel in the past quarter century, even reaching the Supreme Court in 2014 when the court limited the president's power to use them. The court ruled that the executive could only use that authority when the Congress had been recessed for 10 or more days. A new, shaky norm developed in the last decade in both chambers, including in the ogre's first term. When they're in recess, they hold regular "pro-forma" sessions every few days where business isn't conducted, but the recess is officially halted for the purposes of thwarting presidential shenanigans.

Trump has been carrying this grudge since 2020, when he threatened to use—for the first time ever—the president's Article II, Sec. 3 power to "on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, 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." That's another glass-breaking kind of thing in the constitution, and Trump using it to install his clown-car cabinet would not rise to an "extraordinary Occasion" and so any self-respecting Senate would respond with a "see you in court."

Alas, that's not this Senate. Here's the next GOP Majority leader, essentally acquiescing to Trump's demands:

That was Thursday, after the RFK Jr. and Gaetz nomination announcements, when news was swirling the the House Ethics Committee had evidence of the latter's sex trafficking of at least one underaged girl, with "witnesses."

There might be a handful of Republican senators with enough of a sense of shame to oppose that, but I'm not holding my breath. Not when Trump is holding the nuclear threat of declaring them irrelevant and unilaterally adjourning them anyway. After all, who's going to stop him? Certainly not Thune. The Supreme Court? This Supreme Court?

All I can say is get all those vaccinations up to date.