It’s been amusing to witness the ginned-up, phony outrage on the part of Republican senators when it comes to Joe Biden’s proposed Cabinet. Consider Sen. John Cornyn and the potential nomination of Neera Tanden to Office of Management and Budget, whom he apparently doesn’t like because she once tweeted some facts and considered opinions about Cornyn and his GOP cohort. Considering the corrupt personages that Republicans have advanced to Donald Trump’s Cabinet over the last four years, these objections have to be a joke, right?
Let’s just spell this out: Republicans have no credibility, moral authority, or any other legitimate justification to object to anyone nominated to Biden’s proposed Cabinet. None. Nada. Zilch. And anyone who they fail to confirm—for any reason short of wanton lewdness or an undisclosed, serious criminal offense—should be afforded “acting” status by President-elect Biden.
By way of background, let’s carefully review some of the folks who Republicans allowed into Trump’s Cabinet since 2017, including the ones who have been the living embodiment of a kakistocracy—a government specifically designed to include the worst possible people for the job, chosen for the singular purpose of destroying government and for the added fun of spiting the Democratic opposition. Or, if you will, as Mark Sumner calls it, a Trollocracy.
There was never something as simple or innocent as a “judgment call” made for steamrolling whoever Trump’s nominees happened to be. It was by all indications a systematic, deliberate process, Trump’s way or the highway, initiated by people like Steve Bannon at the outset of this administration’s foul tenure.
From the get-go, this administration was going to put up the most unfit, worst human beings, many of whom had little to no respect or regard for the agency they were tasked to run and in some cases, whose entire purpose was to dismantle or neuter that same agency. These people were deliberately selected by Trump, who knew full well that he would be poking a sharp stick in the eyes of Democrats. To be sure, Trump enjoyed every minute of it. And every Republican senator marched in lockstep with him, most with thunderous applause, laughing to themselves all the way.
These were a few of the specimens that were shoved down the nation’s throat over the past four years:
Ben Carson: A former surgeon (God help us all) and failed presidential candidate was put in charge of Housing and Urban Development, an agency where he had absolutely no business. His entire tenure has been an effort to dismantle what many consider the key mission of that agency: removing barriers to housing discrimination. He accomplished this task by hiring people with “zero housing-policy experience, with 16 seemingly given high-paying positions because they worked on either Trump’s or Carson’s presidential campaigns.” He was also deliberately selected as a taunt to Black Americans, the vast majority of whom voted against Trump, even as he worked to wipe out fair housing policies.
Scott Pruitt: A fossil-fuel industry hired gun and anti-regulatory zealot in his prior life as an attorney general for Oklahoma, was placed in charge of this country’s environmental protection. At the EPA, Pruitt swiftly turned that agency into a pro-polluter juggernaut, dismantling environmental regulations until he was finally forced to resign after pursuing what is aptly characterized as “a litany of corrupt practices, illegal activities and misuse of public funds, any one of which would have ended the career of an ordinary politician.”
Betsy DeVos: A billionaire heiress with no educational experience—save her monetary ties to the for-profit diploma mills that specialize in ripping off low-income students with worthless degrees. Her supposed “religious” sensibilities were employed as a siphon in her attempts to drain public schools. DeVos was placed at the head of this nation’s Department of Education in order to wreck it. In addition to abusing her trust by diverting taxpayer funds to private industry, DeVos also dipped her pedicured toes into social engineering, as her family foundation funded efforts to discourage mail-in voting, even as she exhorted schools to remain open in the midst of the worst public health crisis to strike this country in the last century.
William Barr: Tapped to transform the Department of Justice into a vehicle for weaponized discrimination and injustice, Barr, a religious fanatic, spent the entirety of his term slavishly working as a political tool of Trump’s White House. He issued sadistic edicts threatening (and sometimes inflicting) violence on persons peacefully protesting the systemic racism of local police, and hired roving, steroid-infused thugs from the Department of Corrections and other agencies to kidnap and intimidate those protesters. Barr worked hard to misrepresent the findings of the Mueller investigation, and even stooped so low as to try to deflect credible rape allegations against Donald Trump.
Mike Pompeo: The man who immediately set to work on destroying our alliances and wrecked morale at the State Department is another religious zealot, whose foreign policy seems geared to bring about the evangelical fever dream of the “End Times.” After being asked why he didn’t step in to stop the smearing of Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Pompeo resorted to lying about it in an expletive-filled rant directed to an NPR reporter. Meanwhile, Pompeo has spent his tenure bilking American taxpayers for personal gain.
Ryan Zinke: A thuggish and corrupt industry insider named as secretary of the interior, Zinke also left, like Pruitt, after a tenure of enabling polluters to buy out and despoil our public lands. Zinke brought so many ethics probes on himself, he even embarrassed Donald Trump.
And who could forget Wilbur Ross, our secretary of commerce, possibly the most singularly corrupt of all of Trump’s Cabinet appointees? A walking encyclopedia of conflicts of interest, Ross is sycophantic to Trump that he even threatened employees at the NOAA during “Sharpiegate,” after they repudiated Trump’s idiotic suggestions about the trajectory of a deadly hurricane.
There are plenty more of these sterling examples of incompetents, liars, and grifters who infested the highest levels of our government over the course of Trump’s tenure—with nary a peep from the likes of John Cornyn or anyone else.
No one—absolutely no one—in the Republican-controlled Senate has the slightest credibility to pass judgment on who should or who should not be a member of President-elect Biden’s Cabinet, least of all John Cornyn, who enthusiastically voted to confirm every Trump nominee listed above. Republicans forfeited that credibility long ago, and time after time thereafter.
One fact that this incoming administration needs to internalize and remember is that the entire GOP thought process is predicated on the assumption that all Democratic governance is illegitimate, that Biden’s election as president, though temporarily inconvenient to them, is in their eyes just a brief interruption of the rightful entitlement of Republicans to run the Executive Branch.
And they will treat Biden like that. They will treat Biden exactly how they treated President Barack Obama: with no respect. On legislation, on judges, or on Cabinet officials. Hell, even if they wanted to cooperate, they’ll be too scared of Trump’s Twitter finger. They only understand one thing—power, when it’s in their face. They don’t care about the country, they’ve already proved that in spades, and they certainly don’t care about Biden. They will push the limits of their power until they can’t possibly take it any further.
Some people might object that the repeated installment of “acting” heads of agencies may threaten the legitimacy of some their executive functions. But allowing the GOP to effectively insert itself into the executive branch by essentially holding it hostage and only ever confirming Cabinet nominees it fully “approves” of is worse. It’s a fundamental usurpation of power that runs contrary to the intent of the Constitution. It's just a variation, writ large, of what they've already done with judicial nominations, and it cannot stand. If the Supreme Court is forced to weigh in on that basic concept, so be it. But this administration shouldn't start out in a position of weakness by catering to Republican abuse of power.
So do yourself a big favor, President-elect Biden. Hire who you want, and stick with them.