by default, “the first assistant to the office” becomes the acting officer.[3]
the President may direct a person currently serving in a different Senate-confirmed position to serve as acting officer.[3]
the President can select a senior “officer or employee” of the same executive agency who is equivalent to a GS-15 or above on the federal pay scale, if that employee served in that agency for at least 90 days during the 365 days preceding the end of the previous Senate-confirmed officeholder’s service.[3][4]
If someone is placed that does not conform to the law will immediately be challenged in court. The Vacancy Act was passed by a Republican Congress by a vote of 333-95 and signed by Clinton. There will be many federal judges that will uphold the law. This would not be as easy as you imply to have such filled by an unqualified appointee.
The SCOTUS has held that the POTUS can not be charged criminally for violating a law, if the violation was in performance of an “official act”. Appointing cabinet officers is, indisputably, an “official act”. The other restraint would seem to be impeachment. What are the chances of a successful impeachment and conviction in the upcoming Congress?
So we end up with a court that, may, rule the appointments invalid, and a POTUS that says they are valid, because he says they are, and anyone who says the POTUS’ actions are invalid is part of “the enemy within”.
This would not be as easy as you imply to have such filled by an unqualified appointee.
Most laws depend on most people doing the right thing, most of the time. We are entering a new paradigm.
Matt Stoller looked at Matt Gaetz for attorney general and had some positive comments about him. That he could do some good in the job.
Well worth a read. You might be surprised. And it might challenge your assumptions.
Stoller states that he is a democrat.
Let’s see if this survives the gauntlet.
tidbits from article: Congress nearly passed a set of laws to constrain the power of big tech, the first significant legal reform of antitrust in half a century. And one of the key actors in the debate was Matt Gaetz
As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, he had a widely watched hearing with the Defense Secretary over Lockheed Martin’s ownership of the intellectual property of the F-35, a defense aerospace project that is now costing a trillion dollar plus of defense outlays. I’ve spoken with Democratic members seeking to reform the defense base, Gaetz is aligned with that group.
Gaetz is the most aggressive GOP opponent of arbitration agreements used by big corporations to avoid being sued, agreements in those click-and-agree style contracts no one reads that lock in consumers and employees.
Gaetz is also a well-known opponent of government surveillance, has called for pardoning Edward Snowden, and seeks an end to foreign wars.He has also sought to ban stock trading by members, working with high-profile left-wing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and challenging his own party.
Can’t the president exercise Article II, Section 3 of the constitution to adjourn Congress, then make his appointments during recess? I know Congress has never been adjourned in such a way, but what’s preventing this from happening?
He has that power to adjourn them - but the question is whether it matters at all.
Let’s return to the SCOTUS decision in Canning for a moment. Obama was having trouble getting his nominee to the NLRB through the Senate. Whenever the Senate went into recess, they would gavel in a “pro forma” session for a minute or two every three days - so that technically, they were never in recess for longer than three days. Obama decided to make a recess appointment during one of those three day periods.
The Court struck down the recess appointment. Four conservative Justices (of which three are still on the Court) argued that the recess appointment power only applied between the Sessions of Congress each year - not within a Session. The other five adopted an operational view of the Clause. The Appointments Clause is intended to allow vacancies to be filled if the Senate won’t be timely available for a while. It is not intended to let the President bypass Advice and Consent if the Senate, say, breaks for lunch or goes home for a long weekend. So a recess of three days is not a long enough recess to trigger the Clause’s power. Any recess of less than ten days (exclusive of Sundays) isn’t long enough, because there’s no reason that the appointment can’t wait for Congress to get back.
So if the President deliberately orchestrates a long adjournment for the express purpose of bypassing the A&C requirement, there’s a good chance that SCOTUS would say that it doesn’t count as a “recess” for the purpose of the Appointments Clause. Three of them already held that none of these intra-session breaks count at all, and there’s a good chance that Kagan and Sotomayor would stick to that operational view that the Clause only kicks in if the Senate is actually unavailable, not deliberately standing outside in the hall because the President wants to avoid the A&C process.
He used his Harvard Law degree to immediately develop a H problem and melt his mind. Just ask him he is brilliant. He just does not like needles.
My close friend loves RFK jr. He is anti vax. We talked Ivermectin a few nights ago. I listened this time. Then I pointed out that the patients who went to the quacks did not need hospitalization. Those who immediately did need hospitalization were not treated by the quacks. The mortality rate among people who went to the quacks did not prove Ivermectin did anything at all.
RFK jr and my friend can not understand population studies.
I shed light on it for my friend. He had no clue that people who were sick but not in need of hospitalization would be okay. Most people prior to Omicron who got sick did not need to go to hospital.
If I am reading this rightly the odds of hospitalization with Delta was 2:29
My friend also claimed that there are no studies of vaccines for side effects at the NIH. Mean never any of the vaccines being studied ever. I debunked that the next day in an email.
The problem he is highly educated but ignorant people are suggesting things that fit his world view of medicine. He is not doing the research he claimed he was.
He was right I had done no research. I generally knew the lay of the land. So now I will do the research and email him. The lay of the land had always been enough. In fact he did zero research but the internet put lies in front of him for years.
I appreciate you taking the time to go through the details.
Much of what you describe depends on people doing the right thing. I’ve lost a lot of faith. The next administration will present a bounty of opportunities for redemption.
I mean - I guess? Most of those quotes are directed at Democrats trying to blockade appointments…but that’s not really the issue for the cabinet picks. They’re too high profile and too important for vacancies to linger on. Trump filled his cabinet by April 28 last go around - exactly as long as it took Obama to fill his. I can see the Senate deciding not to hold pro forma sessions over the summer so that any lower- and mid-level nominees can get cleared, which is what used to happen back in the day. If the Senate takes their usual month off, then Trump might have an opening for recess appointments.
But the Cabinet posts? Those are going to a vote within the next two months. There, the issue isn’t whether the Democrats blockade them, but whether Gaetz and Kennedy (and maybe Hegseth) have problems getting to 50. I’m not sure it’s the plan to artificially take a lengthy recess in March so that Gaetz can avoid a floor vote that he’d lose.
It is an interesting ploy. It is not only the chance of losing a floor vote, but the embarrassing things that the opposition might bring up in committee hearings. Remember the hearings for Justice Thomas? He cleared the committee hearings, insisting he never played the race card to gain preferential treatment. Then he was recalled to face the sexual harassment charges, and played the race card “high tech lynching”, “trying to keep the black man down”. Ugly scene.
TFG is acting like he has no fear of his nominations running into trouble in the Senate.
I think that’s right. I think what he most wants to accomplish with several of the agencies is to drastically change the agencies themselves, root and branch. So he’s picking folks to head those agencies who are utterly unafraid to get into fights, to be attacked, to be shamed and criticized and “run into trouble.” He wants people who cannot be embarrassed, because he wants them to gore oxen and do things that will deeply annoy members of Congress that are allies with some of these agencies.
It’s an inward looking agenda for some of these agencies. He’s not asking what someone like Gaetz can do with Justice; he wants Gaetz to do things to Justice.
I am inclined to agree. TFG clearly said he wants to, not only appoint the heads of departments, but reach deep within departments to replace civil servants with appointed political hacks. Remember “heck of a job Brownie”? Imagine that level of competence, extending several levels below the head of department. As we learned in b-school, decades ago, there really is such a thing as “setting something up to fail”. I can’t think of a better way to destroy the government from within.
I’m not sure questioning their competence is a fair criticism, though.
Gaetz is a pretty competent guy, after all. No, he’s not competent at being a run-of-the-mill Congresscritter - drafting legislation and getting budget amendments into omnibus bills to support local constituent services and the like. But he’s an absolutely brutal political operative, and has been devastatingly effective at bending the arc of the House in the direction he wants it to go.
So he will be phenomenally ill-suited to accomplish the “external” goals of the DOJ - efficiently administering prosecutions and investigations and whatnot. But he might be astonishingly well-suited for a massive re-org of the Department. He’s good at “cuttin’ heads,” has shown he’s adept at achieving his goals under heavy criticism and attack, and is completely fearless in getting into conflicts with entrenched power.
I’ve been thinking of John J. Ray, III - the corporate lawyer and CEO who specializes in going into catastrophically failed companies like Enron and FTX and managing them through their collapse. He probably isn’t the best person to run an “ordinary” energy company or crypto/financial company. He’s good at performing a very specific type of management.
Gaetz and RFK, Jr. have the “superpower” of being completely and utterly indifferent to the criticism of other people, even very powerful people, in pursuit of their objectives. That’s a handicap if you’re looking for someone to run an agency in “ordinary” mode. But if you’re looking for someone to completely reorder how an agency does things, that’s actually a very core competency for that…
Well, in the absence of the normal confirmation process, they are only accountable to one person. And that one person is completely unaccountable, to anyone, for at least four years, maybe more, maybe for life.
Tech corporations will be ordering their representatives to vote NO on Gaetz.
Also surveillance contractors whose business has boomed in contracts since 9/11 will be lobbying their reps also.
Lawyer told me yesterday recess appointments are only for a few weeks. The Senate still needs to offer consent.
There is a lot of talk of a sacrificial lamb. The Yahoo article this morning on that showed him in the photo.
The idea was to get him out of congress. He bucks the party endlessly. He leads six votes. They do not have that margin in the Congress. Or just barely. They hate him and this is payback. The R senators want the report to be public. Charges would be local and not federal. He can not be pardoned. They really hate him.
Never forget the cannibal remark from the 90s.
Between the senate leader and this move the more moderate win out. That is welcome.
iirc, Bolton’s stint in the UN was a recess appointment. He was in that post from August 2, 2005 to December 31, 2006, the end of that Congress. According to the Wiki article, he was again nominated for the UN post in 2006, and, again, the nomination was in deep trouble, when Bolton announced he did not want it any longer.