Stop Handwringing, Start Fighting

Plus: The next GOP Senate gears up to hand Trump more of its power.

Donald Trump, as everyone knows, is no neocon. He’s so not a neocon that he recently spent days insisting he didn’t actually want to see Liz Cheney shot—he just wanted her to have a reckoning with her “war hawk” views!

Interestingly, however, Trump has just announced his first foreign-policy appointment—and wouldn’t you know it, his ambassador to the United Nations will be none other than hawkish (former?) neocon Elise Stefanik.

It’s almost as though Trump was actually riled up at Cheney for unrelated reasons—wonder what those might have been. Happy Monday.

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U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY). (Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images.)

First Time Farce, Second Tragedy

by William Kristol

On April 21, 1961, at a press conference days after the botched Bay of Pigs operation, as fingers were being pointed and responsibility disclaimed, President John F. Kennedy wryly remarked: “There’s an old saying that victory has one hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”

Today’s orphan in defeat is the Democratic party. Democrats lost the presidential election last Tuesday. And suddenly prominent members of the party—who were cautiously optimistic a week ago about the campaign they had run—are denigrating their party’s effort or denying responsibility for it. Senior Democrats are disclaiming any parentage for what took place on the trail. Old friends are pretending they barely know the party leaders in question.

You might say: Wait a second! The Democratic party had to compete in an election where it arguably had the worst of all worlds—having to replace its presidential nominee less than four months before Election Day, but with the new candidate still having the burdens of incumbency in an anti-incumbent era. And even so, Kamala Harris won more than 48 percent of the vote; the Democrats enter the new Congress with a respectable number of senators (47) and about as many House members as before; the party held their 23 governorships, and suffered minimal losses at the state legislative level.

You might say all that, but to little avail. The Democrats lost. To Donald Trump. That’s a big deal, and its consequences are pretty awful. So some orphaning is natural and inevitable.

Still, it wasn’t the Democratic party that nominated Trump three times. It wasn’t Democrats who shied away from the fight against Trump. It’s the Republican party that has deeply, catastrophically, perhaps decisively failed America this past decade.

And now it isn’t Democratic senators who are rushing to give up the constitutional prerogative of advice and consent over Trump’s nominees. It isn’t Democratic senators who are planning to back off from their support of Ukraine. It isn’t Democrats who seem fine with destroying the civil service and the rule of law at home, and coddling dictators abroad.

Do Democrats need to examine their weaknesses and mistakes? Yes. Is the Democratic “brand” problematic in all kinds of ways? Sure.

But the Democratic party has the ordinary problems of a political party in our democracy. Whereas today’s Republican party is an extraordinary threat to our democracy. Yes, Democrats could surely have done a better job of explaining the GOP’s capitulation to authoritarianism and why Republicans should not be put back in power. But the fact is that it’s Republicans, not Democrats, who can’t be trusted with power.

I respect the desire of Democrats to follow the injunction, “Physician, heal thyself.” I applaud the instinct of so many Democrats to be honest about their errors, and to be serious about fixing them. I admire the fact they’re not putting their heads in the sand. I’m kind of impressed by all the post-mortems and talk about autopsies.

But the patient, American democracy, isn’t dead. And American democracy needs to be saved now. Elected Democrats have positions of responsibility. They have to put their heads down and fight. And it will turn out that engaging in various worthwhile fights will also help the party heal itself.

So the task for Democrats is less to save the Democratic party in the future, than to save the nation now. For Trump’s second term looks to be as dangerous as many of us feared.

Karl Marx wrote, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Given what we’ve seen of the plans of Trump and Elon Musk, of JD Vance and Tucker Carlson and Don Jr., I’d say this: Trump’s first term may have been farce, but his second term could well be tragedy.

Preventing tragedy at home and abroad is a task for a great political party. At times in the past the Democrats have taken on such a task. It falls to them to do so again.

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Yes, Sir! Right Away, Sir!

by Andrew Egger

Senate Republicans will assemble this week for their first competitive leadership elections since Mitch McConnell took the reins in 2007. And Donald Trump is busy extracting promises that whoever wins won’t prioritize protecting the chamber’s constitutional prerogatives.

“Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Sunday afternoon. “Sometimes the votes can take two years, or more. This is what they did four years ago, and we cannot let it happen again. We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY!”

The three Senate Republicans jonesing for the top spot—Sens. John Thune, John Cornyn, and Rick Scott—sprinted to back Trump up by saying they wouldn’t take recess appointments off the table. It was preemptive capitulation via tweet.

The Constitution tasks the Senate with confirming the president’s appointments to more than 1000 federal positions, including the cabinet secretaries. These votes require only simple majorities. And with there likely to be 53 Republicans in the Senate, Trump should have little trouble getting his people confirmed.

But Trump is now pushing for a greater level of personal control over the appointment process, trying to extract commitments that, at least in come cases, the Senate will let itself be bypassed altogether. Perhaps he hopes to push through some truly heinous nominees. Or perhaps it’s just a power flex.

The Constitution’s appointments clause stipulates that, when the Senate is not in session, the president is empowered to make recess appointments—appointments temporarily not subject to Senate approval. However, the courts have ruled that the Senate can block this maneuver using pro forma sessions—brief formal sessions gaveled in throughout a congressional break that ensure the Senate never technically enters recess.

The Senate has done exactly this since Barack Obama’s second term, ensuring the president can’t short-circuit their authority to approve his officials. The litmus test Trump is now giving for the next Senate leader is that they will agree to allow this short-circuiting again.

It might not shock you that Senate Republicans once guarded their advice-and-consent prerogatives a little more zealously. Here was Thune himself back in 2014, decrying Obama’s attempted use of recess appointments: “When the president couldn’t get his appointments through the Senate, he decided to ignore the law and attempt an end run around Congress. . . . Congress, not the president, has the authority to determine its own rules.”

In similar fashion, Republicans once decried Obama for his use of “czars”—unconfirmed bureaucrats who take over issue portfolios. When Trump announced former acting ICE Director Tom Homan as his “border czar” last night, top Trump booster Matt Schlapp replied with the equivalent of a shrug emoji. 

Look: Trump just won the election. For the most part, he’s entitled to get the cabinet he wants. With plenty of wiggle room in his Senate majority, it’s likely that he will get the cabinet he wants—recess appointments or no.

But two things about this little episode spell trouble. First, Trump’s successful attempt to extract these promises from Republican leadership candidates shows how much more capable he’ll be of wielding power this time around.

And second, not one of the candidates running to replace McConnell felt it behooved them to take a stand to defend the institutional power of the Senate. The leadership election is about the least populist vote you could imagine: a secret ballot of the Senate’s Republican caucus. If Cornyn or Thune were confident that a majority of their colleagues were still institutionalists at heart, this might have been a moment to try to sell themselves over the other: We’re going to be more than just a rubber stamp for this president. But neither saw any upside there. From head to toe, it’s Donald Trump’s Republican party now.

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Quick Hits

MAGAVILLE IN THE WEST WING: Trump is beginning to etch out the top levels of his administration, and, yes, it’s drawn from the exact same tight crew of diehards that one would have expected. Tom Homan—who openly mused about deporting full families when only a portion of them were here illegally—is going to be the border czar. Rep. Elise Stefanik, meanwhile, will be nominated as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. The congresswoman wrote an op-ed recently for the Washington Examiner expressing her belief that the United States should pull funding from the United Nations if it didn’t reform itself and stop being so critical of Israel.

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PRESIDENT MUSK: A weird dynamic is taking place, in which the world’s richest man is essentially operating as a shadow president. Elon Musk was on the phone when Donald Trump called Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky last week. He also has been demanding that Senate Republicans agree allow Trump to make recess appointments. He appears to be helping run the government staffing process. And according to CNN, he has “been seen at Mar-a-Lago nearly every single day since Donald Trump won, dining with him on the patio at times.” It’s all fun in the sun, we suppose, until Trump starts to think that maybe he’s not actually running things after all.

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THE LAST TWO DOMINOS: Six days after election day, we’ve got Associated Press calls in all but two of this cycle’s Senate elections. In Pennsylvania, Republican Dave McCormick is now the extremely heavy favorite, leading by more than half a point over incumbent Sen. Bob Casey with only a smattering of mostly Republican-friendly areas left to count. Meanwhile, in Arizona, Rep. Ruben Gallego leads MAGA stalwart Kari Lake by more than 2 points with 91 percent of the vote counted—he isn’t a lock yet, but he’s comfortably ahead.

If both races resolve as they’re expected to, Republicans will carry a 53-vote majority into the next Congress. A three-seat majority! Over in the House, Mike Johnson is green with envy.

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