'What Will John Thune Allow' Is the Wrong Question
Any handful of Republican lawmakers can stop Trump's insane nominations, as they sometimes did in his last term.
Dear readers,
On Sunday, President-elect Trump tweeted that any candidate for Senate Majority Leader “must agree to Recess Appointments” for his cabinet. Journalist Yashar Ali rounded up the responses from the three senators seeking the job, tweeting that they all “quickly agreed to his terms.” But actually, two of them — including the winning candidate — did not agree to his terms.
You can read the statements yourself. Rick Scott, the preferred candidate of Trumpworld who ended up finishing last in the race for leader, did say “100% agree” to Trump’s demand. But John Cornyn only promised to keep the Senate in session to confirm nominees. Cornyn also made the factual observation that the Constitution gives the president the power to make recess appointments, but that’s not a promise that the Senate will adjourn itself to make that power available. And John Thune, the ultimate winner of the election, said “all options are on the table” — a classic noncommittal Washington answer, not a promise to do anything.
I’m not saying the Republican Congress definitely won’t collude with Trump to create the opportunity for recess appointments (though my guess, for reasons I lay out below, is that they ultimately won’t). I am saying that if you want to understand what’s happening right now, you need to start with understanding that the incoming Senate Majority Leader has not already promised to do so.
The thing about recess appointments is that, for the president to make them, the Senate needs to be adjourned for a period of at least 10 days. In recent years, the practice of the House and Senate has been to meet every three days for pro-forma sessions, attended only by a handful of members, so they are never in a recess that would make the power available. Trump would like that practice to change. But even if Thune had agreed to this (which he hasn’t, at least not publicly), that wouldn’t be enough to make it happen. Adjourning either house of Congress for a period of more than three days requires a majority vote of both houses of Congress — that is, Thune would need to bring 49 other Senate Republicans along with him, plus 218 of the approximately 221 Republicans who will serve in the next House of Representatives. Alternatively, if one house votes to adjourn and the other does not agree, Trump could assert a never-before-used presidential power to set the duration of both houses’ adjournment. But even that approach would still require the near-unanimous acquiescence of Republicans in at least one house of Congress.
In the abstract — and we were in an abstract frame when Trump first started pushing for the next Senate to go along with this recess appointment approach — the purpose of the adjournment would be to secure the appointment of nominees who can’t quickly get 50 Republican votes in the Senate. Now that Trump has started naming names, the purpose is more concrete: It’s to get Matt Gaetz installed as Attorney General, along with some other picks that are likely to face Republican resistance, like Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
If there are 50 Senate Republicans who are willing to confirm these nominees, then they can be confirmed through the ordinary process. If there are not 50 such Republicans, then an adjournment for the purpose of allowing recess appointments would require the cooperation of at least one Republican who opposes the nominees who would be installed as a result.1 And that’s why I don’t expect the adjournment to happen: if 50 Senate Republicans are prepared to work together to make Matt Gaetz the Attorney General, they can do so without adjourning, and if 50 Senate Republicans aren’t prepared to do that, they won’t adjourn.
So the big question here isn’t about Thune and what he’s willing to do for Trump. It’s about the likes of Bill Cassidy, John Curtis, Thom Tillis, Todd Young, Shelley Moore Capito, Joni Ernst and Mitch McConnell. Will they join Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski to block the adjournment strategy and also to block some of the most absurd nominations? I think it’s fairly likely that they will. First of all, Republican senators are already being remarkably open in saying that Gaetz is likely to face confirmation issues. Second, some of Trump’s most controversial picks did get withdrawn in the face of opposition from Senate Republicans during his last term, including Steve Moore and Herman Cain, whom he tried and failed to place on the Federal Reserve Board. (At the time, Capito said it was “hard to look past” sexist remarks Moore had made about women — one can imagine how she might feel about Gaetz.) And third, in the case of some of these nominees, Republicans won’t simply be echoing Democratic reasons for opposing them — they’ll have their own set of objections.
Consider the idea that RFK Jr. might run HHS. Is the pharmaceutical lobby going to take lying down the idea that he would oversee the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services? What will agribusiness have to say about his desire to regulate Americans into (what he sees as) healthier eating? How will social conservatives feel about Republicans’ first post-Dobbs HHS secretary being pro-choice? (“Not good” is the answer to that last one). Republicans don’t need to oppose his nomination because they agree with Democrats that he’s “too extreme,” and they don’t need to focus on vaccines — they have a whole menu of ways to object to him that would have them backing up key players in their own coalition. Similarly, lots of hawkish Republicans have longstanding policy disagreements with former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, and the Hill is full of Republicans with a strong personal hatred for Matt Gaetz and resentment over his defenestration of Kevin McCarthy — there are lots of ways for Republican senators to get to “no” on these picks that don’t even involve agreeing with Democrats.
I would contrast these nominations with that of, for example, Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense. I don’t think Hegseth is well-qualified at all to oversee an organization with three million employees. But he’s broadly a conservative in good standing, and so I’d expect Republican senators to let the president-elect have his dumb pick there.
Sometimes liberals think it’s sophisticated to assume the worst — that Trump will get to do whatever he wants, and that Republicans in Congress will acquiesce to all his demands no matter how ridiculous. I think it makes more sense to look back to the mixed record from his first term. There’s a reason we never had Export-Import Bank President Scott Garrett, Federal Reserve Governor Judy Shelton (or Cain or Moore), or Veterans Affairs Secretary Ronny Jackson, and it’s that sometimes, Republicans joined Democrats to sink Trump’s nominations. The key political question then is how to foster and encourage that cooperation from enough Republicans.
Finally, I have one thought on what it means that President-elect Trump appears to be throwing caution to the wind and nominating lunatics for key jobs in his administration. There was a fair amount of “he won’t really do that” thinking from Trump’s supporters in the lead up to this election. And even though I opposed Trump because of what I feared he would do, he’s already done things I didn’t expect him to follow through on. In particular, I expected RFK Jr. to end up running some blue-ribbon commission rather than a cabinet department (and that may still be what happens if his nomination fails in the Senate). But there are a lot of things Trump wants to do that won’t require any cooperation from Congress — we should adjust our priors about how unleashed Trump is going to be with regard to these, and about what the effects will be.
One item I’d place at the top of that list is tariffs, which the president has extensive statutory authority to impose and raise without any input from Congress. Wall Street has shrugged off Trump’s promise to impose 60% unilateral tariffs on China and 10% or more on the rest of the world. Scott Bessent, the financier who might or might not be Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, called Trump’s proposal a “negotiating position,” and my guess had been that Trump would come into office and do some threatening and cajoling and negotiating before he actually moves to up all the tariffs. But now that he’s out of the gate with RFK Jr. and all this nonsense, I’m increasingly inclined to think he’ll just go ahead and impose big ones — a move that could have big and unexpected impacts on financial markets, interest rates and inflation, and that doesn’t seem to have been digested into asset prices yet.
So anyway, watch out for that.
Very seriously,
Josh
Alternatively, Republicans in the House could vote for an adjournment resolution, setting up Trump to assert his power to adjourn the houses of Congress when they can’t agree on their own terms of adjournment. And if Republicans had a wide majority in the House, I would be concerned about the possibility that House Republicans would collude with the White House to undermine the Senate’s authority to advise and consent on nominations. But just as John Thune can’t adjourn the Senate all by himself, Speaker Mike Johnson would need virtually every member of his conference to go along with the adjournment effort because Republicans will have a razor-thin majority in the next House. Since this gambit would be in service of promoting Matt Gaetz, a man who many House Republicans hate with the fire of a thousand suns, I don’t expect it will be possible to gather nearly all House Republicans in support of it.
"Try to limit your reactions to things that are actually in the process of happening" does seem like a good guiding principle for staying mentally healthy for the next four years.
Trump wants to govern as an autocrat and absolutely will do so if you don't stop him. This is obviously very horrible, but it genuinely has zero new-information content for all except voters who *just* turned 18. I have known this for an ironclad fact for about four years, and strongly suspected it for eight. It's priced-in.
This is great, and I'm appreciating the increased frequency of new writing after what felt like a very long summer lull!