George F. Will: The Senate’s Madisonian opportunity on those nominations
A good thing about Trump’s ghastly nominees: They could jolt the Senate into reclaiming its independence.
An 1867 engraving depicting James Madison, the fourth U.S. president. (iStock)
Accelerant: noun. A substance used to aid the spread of fire.
Donald Trump, a political accelerant, has ignited, with malice aforethought, a conflagration that will singe him. And because of him, the hard, gemlike flame of James Madison’s intellect will again illuminate Washington, if the Senate is provoked into rediscovering its role.
Some of Trump’s nominees for high executive branch responsibilities radiate contempt for everyone except the small American minority that resides on the wilder shores of MAGAdom. His coldest contempt is for the Senate. Like King Ferdinand VII, who upon regaining Spain’s throne in 1813 vowed to end “the disastrous mania of thinking,” Trump expects the Senate to tug its forelock and forgo independent judgment.
Some of his nominees are so ghastly they could be salutary. They might jolt the Senate, united in nausea, into a declaration of independence. Which is what Madison, the Founders’ best mind, had in mind in Federalist 51.
Explaining “the necessary partition of power among the several departments,” he emphasized that each branch “should have a will of its own.” Congress, proud of its agency and jealous of its prerogatives, should not flinch from frequently being rivalrous rather than collaborative with the chief executive, whose primary duty is secondary: It is the faithful execution of the laws Congress initiates.
Since the swift emergence, in the 1790s, of political parties, which the Constitution’s Framers had not anticipated, politics has been a team sport; individuals are expected to frequently subordinate their judgments to their team’s preferences. Since the 20th-century emergence of president-centric politics, abetted by technologies of mass communication, congressional members of the president’s party have increasingly been primarily considered mere facilitators of his agenda. Since the coming of this century’s polarization, party politics has been dueling tribes that brook no insubordination against a chieftain’s edicts.
Woodrow Wilson, the first thoroughly progressive president and (hence) the first president to criticize the Founding, did so resoundingly. He repudiated the Constitution’s basic architecture, the separation of powers. Progressives understand and regret this separation as a retrograde inhibition on the president’s ability to expand government, and to wield it using broad, semi-legislative discretion. Trump merely regrets the separation viscerally, as a hound regrets the leash.
Hence today’s drama surrounding the Senate’s unshirkable duty to consent to, or reject, presidential nominees to high offices. Filling such offices is not an unencumbered presidential prerogative. They are not baubles presidents can dispense, unhindered, as rewards for, and anticipation of, servility.
When on April 12, 1945, a White House call told Harry S. Truman to come there immediately, the vice president (who hailed from Jackson County, Missouri) exclaimed, “Jesus Christ and General Jackson!” Sen. John Thune (South Dakota) must have felt similar astonishment and foreboding when, three hours after he became leader of Senate Republicans, Trump nominated for attorney general someone as sordid as the nominator.
Matt Gaetz, an arrested-development adolescent with the swagger of a sequined guitarist in a low-rent casino, will not be confirmed. His grotesqueness, however, makes three other nominees seem what they are not: acceptable. Considering only competence — leaving aside character blemishes — nothing in their resumes qualifies Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the policy and administrative challenges of running the Defense Department, the intelligence community and the Department of Health and Human Services, respectively.
The Senate’s power to reject presidential nominees is as plenary as is the president’s power to nominate. “Ambition,” said Madison, “must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” A senator’s interest is braided with the Senate’s powers. The Framers did not merely anticipate presidential-congressional conflict, they encouraged it with the Constitution’s structure. Senators can fulfill Madison’s expectations and hopes by counteracting presidential ambitions.
Although some Republican senators’ canine devotion to the president-elect is sincere, many have little respect and less affection for him, and some reciprocate his disdain. Rejecting Gaetz would exercise almost-atrophied institutional muscles and might be habit-forming: Individual senators’ enhanced self-esteem can be a precursor to institutional pride, which is a prerequisite for recovering Madisonian balance between the two political branches.
As a 1950s presidential election approached, the satirical comedian Mort Sahl said: “Eisenhower stands for ‘gradualism.’ Stevenson stands for ‘moderation.’ Between these two extremes, we the people must choose.” Seven decades later, voters again had to choose between two comparable candidates, this time, however, comparably unsuitable. The one voters chose has inadvertently brought us a Madisonian moment he should be made to regret. Senators: Carpe diem.
