Democracy is not a mechanism - it's a process that requires our attention.
Like the word "love", it's a noun, but it has to function as a verb.
NYT:
Why Are Senate Republicans Playing Dead?
They’re allowing President Trump to place loyalists in important government positions.
Saturday will mark the 500th straight day that there will be no Senate-confirmed secretary of Homeland Security — the longest vacancy in the 231-year history of the executive branch cabinet. What’s more, unlike the rare, lengthy vacancies of previous administrations (usually a result of failed nominees), President Trump hasn’t sent a single name to the Republican-controlled Senate since April 10, 2019. Instead, he has publicly insisted that he prefers the “flexibility” that comes from filling positions like secretary of Homeland Security with an “acting” officer.
Last month, in a rare break from the White House, the Senate pushed back against the president’s nominee to the senior policy position at the Pentagon, Anthony Tata, a retired Army one-star general turned Fox News commentator. He provoked bipartisan opposition in light of a series of inflammatory tweets from 2018 (for example, he called Islam “the most oppressive violent religion”; he later apologized in a letter to senators). Mr. Trump responded by installing him anyway — as the senior official “performing the duties of the deputy under secretary of defense for policy.”
It’s easy to blame Mr. Trump for abusing the labyrinthine process for filling vacancies in senior executive branch positions — because he has. This administration has found every plausible loophole — and some implausible (if not unlawful) ones — to install its preferred choices in an impressively broad and important array of senior government jobs.
But the real culprit for these abuses, and the principal obstacle to any meaningful reform, is the Senate — which has simply rolled over in the name of Republican Party unity as the president has run roughshod over its constitutional role.
Consider Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He was seemingly set to block Mr. Tata’s nomination last month before Mr. Trump withdrew it. But when the president installed Mr. Tata at the Pentagon anyway, Mr. Inhofe didn’t object. “While I have always stressed the need to have Senate-confirmed leadership in top Pentagon positions,” he said, referring to the Defense Department, “I believe it is within the president’s authority to appoint D.O.D. officials when and as appropriate.”
Similar sentiments have been expressed up and down the Senate Republican caucus, from the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to his most libertarian colleagues. It would be easy enough for the Senate to use its formidable leverage to demand that the president send in confirmable nominees for these positions. It could hold up other nominees (including for judgeships), exercise more rigorous oversight of agencies without confirmed leaders and withhold must-pass legislation. And yet, even in Mr. Tata’s case, the Senate has played dead.
In Article II, Section 2, the Constitution expressly lays out a unique and central role for the Senate (“Advice and Consent”) in this process. Choosing nominees is the president’s power, but confirming them is the Senate’s. This design, as Gouverneur Morris explained at the Constitutional Convention, would provide “security” against a rogue president. As Alexander Hamilton put it in The Federalist No. 76, “it would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.”
These considerations were front and center when the Supreme Court, in a 2014 opinion, struck down efforts by President Barack Obama in 2012 to end-run the Senate through recess appointments.
Even if Mr. Trump’s reliance upon acting officers does not violate the text of the Constitution (a matter of considerable debate), it certainly violates its spirit. It allows the president to administer entire departments and to impose policies that affect millions of Americans through individuals who weren’t — and, in many cases, would not have been — confirmed by the Senate. The effects are becoming increasingly public.
For example, the absence of any Senate-confirmed leadership at Homeland Security, where nine of the top 11 positions are vacant, has been repeatedly given as part of the explanation for why the president chose to rely on department officers for his response to the protests in Portland, Ore. — because acting officials are even less beholden to their Senate overseers than other agency heads.
There are obvious ways for Congress to close some of the loopholes that President Trump has exploited, including some of the proposals from Representative Katie Porter, Democrat of California, in the Accountability for Acting Officials Act. Among other things, Congress can be far clearer about the pool of eligible individuals to temporarily fill cabinet vacancies. It could also designate more explicit lines of succession within specific agencies, provide far more strict time limits and, in cases of real abuse, gradually reduce the powers that “acting” officials are allowed to exercise compared with their Senate-confirmed predecessors.
But the real solution is for the Senate to do its job — not just when the president is from a different party, but when he’s on the same team, too. A Republican Senate was only too happy to assert its institutional prerogatives (at the expense of a Supreme Court seat) during a Democratic administration but has been just as happy to abandon it when a Republican sits in the Oval Office.
That’s not the separation of powers; it’s the separation of parties. And it’s a dereliction of duty for which the Senate, and individual senators, can — and should — be held responsible.
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