Questioning Presidential Appointments Comes with the Senate's Job Description
What The Federalist's Shawn Fleetwood gets woefully wrong about the Senate.
Understandably, supporters of President Trump’s agenda are frustrated that certain high-profile picks to fill Trump’s cabinet are coming under scrutiny in the Senate. Not only that, but some senators who have said no to or resisted particular nominees have been members of the president’s own party. How can Trump get his priorities done if even Republicans are standing in the way?
One of these frustrated Trump supporters is Shawn Fleetwood, a prominent staff writer at The Federalist. Recently, the Senate confirmed Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, but he received significant questioning and opposition from some Senate Republicans. Three Republicans—Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski—in the 53-47 seat GOP majority Senate voted no on Hegseth, forcing Vice President J.D. Vance to cast a tie-breaking vote to confirm the now defense secretary. Whether or not all the reasoning of those Hegseth-skeptical Republicans was sound, Fleetwood sees any Republican opposition to Hegseth and other significant cabinet nominations as deeply problematic.
Hegseth’s hopes of becoming the next defense secretary came very close to being dashed. If any other Republican joined McConnell, Collins, or Murkowski, Hegseth would have been sunk. Senators Thom Tillis and Joni Ernst had been expressing doubts over Hegseth leading up to the confirmation hearings, but they eventually relented. This close call leads Fleetwood to inquire, “Why was the success of Hegseth’s confirmation in question to begin with?” The answer: “The GOP establishment’s willingness to sabotage these Trump appointees before the upper chamber votes on their nominations.”
Other controversial picks who are yet to be confirmed are Tulsi Gabbard—slated to be the next Director of National Intelligence—and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the Secretary of Health and Human Services hopeful. According to Fleetwood, the Republicans who are questioning these nominees are not asking “legitimate questions” about their views but rather “subvert[ing]” them and protecting the “D.C. status quo.” Hegseth, Gabbard, and Kennedy would disrupt these government agencies, and this potential “disruption,” Fleetwood boldly contends, is just what “more than 77 million Americans voted for when they sent Trump back to the White House” with “the expectation that a GOP Congress would work with him to transform the federal government.” Therefore, the voters expected Trump’s cabinet nominees to get a “fair process” and have their agenda to champion “America First” policies backed.
For Fleetwood, he finds it repulsive that “GOP voters should not have to wait around and guess whether Republican senators” would vote to confirm the “appointees of a Republican president.” After all, some of these same Republicans cast votes for some of Biden’s cabinet picks, so why can’t they get in line with Trump’s?
If you view this process as someone who desires the Trump agenda to float on, full steam ahead, then it’s very easy to get upset at the roadblocks the avatars of your policy preferences are facing. Fleetwood wants there to be significant progress for the MAGA agenda, and if forces in the GOP are getting in the way of that progress, then barriers be damned. Fleewood’s frustration, however, is fueled by poor assumptions and a lack of understanding of how our constitutional system was intended to operate.
Let’s tackle those poor assumptions first.
To say the “GOP establishment” is working against Trump’s cabinet picks is a bad characterization. A small select number of skeptical Republican senators is hardly the “establishment.” If anything, the establishment is largely behind Trump’s nominees, and Trump essentially is the establishment. The vast majority of Republicans have marched lock step behind Trump’s agendas. Republican leadership certainly hasn’t been signaling any real opposition. So, to call the Republicans he doesn’t like the “establishment” is just intellectually lazy on Fleetwood’s part.
The other really bad assumption Fleetwood makes is this idea that confirming Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is what Trump’s 77 million voters had in mind when they cast their ballots for him. When we’re talking about that many people, it is absurd to believe that they uniformly have the same viewpoint on specific policies and actions of the president. Based upon polling, we can by and large say confidently that what Trump supporters voted on was fixing the economy and tackling illegal immigration. And that doesn’t even mean those voters are going to largely approve of the way Trump tries handling those top issues. How can we assert, then, that Trump’s voters expect all of these cabinet nominations to sail through?
The argument should not be whether it is the people’s will somehow that these specific appointees get confirmed; it should be about whether or not these appointees are qualified for the job.
That brings us to the biggest issue with Fleetwood’s anger with Senate Republicans. By insisting that the GOP senators must get behind a GOP president’s cabinet appointments because they supposedly have a popular mandate to do so, Fleetwood is completely misunderstanding our constitutional order.
The Constitution prescribes that the Senate must play an “advice and consent” role to the president’s nominees, and Fleetwood acknowledges this fact. But he seems to believe that advice and consent does not include senators of the same party of the president ultimately turning down his nominations. Alexander Hamilton would disagree.
In Federalist 76 and 77, Hamilton aptly explains the Senate’s role in confirming presidential nominations. According to Hamilton, if effective governance was going to succeed, then it would be crucial that there be “stability” in the president’s administration. This means ensuring that only qualified nominees find their way into the president’s cabinet. By the Senate’s constitutional obligation to review the president’s nominees, Hamilton argued, “It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.”
Furthermore, it would be no real obstruction to the president’s broad political agenda (unless that agenda is rooted in corruption) if the Senate were to turn down a cabinet appointment. “But might not his nomination be overruled?” Hamilton asks, “I grant it might, yet this could only be to make place for another nomination by himself.” If the president loses on one of his appointments, he can appoint someone else to carry on with his agenda. The whole point of the Senate’s role is to restrain the president's nominees from nominating poor candidates, thus ensuring stability in his administration of ideally competent members.
Granted, many of Trump’s controversial picks have controversial agendas that are fueling some Republican senators opposition. Many of RFK’s troubling goals for his Make America Healthy Again policies come to mind. But if Trump’s agenda is to fulfill RFK’s vision, then he doesn’t need RFK to do so. Any portion of the president’s goals does not rest upon the confirmation of one man.
Fleetwood entirely misses the point about the Senate’s role. It is not to simply rubber stamp all of Trump’s appointments. Questioning nominees and rejecting the unfit ones literally comes with the Senate’s job description found in the Constitution. Fleetwood might disagree with certain senators’ espoused belief that a nominee is unfit, but his argument that they are subverting the will of the people is blatantly incorrect.
It’s not the job of senators, including those of the president’s party, to approve of all of the wishes that come down from the executive branch, or vice versa. We don’t live in a parliamentary democracy. We live in a constitutional republic. The Senate (along with the rest of the federal government) unfortunately has rarely lived up to the ideals our Founders championed. But that is no excuse to continue the trend. Go ahead and argue that a Republican senator is wrong to oppose Hegseth, Kennedy, or whoever else. Don’t argue, though, that they are supposed to vote a certain way. That’s not how this is supposed to work.
My recommendation for Mr. Fleetwood: Spend some time reading the Federalist Papers.