GOP lawmakers protest Trump’s 'bad strategy' for ramming through controversial nominees

25 November 2024

President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to use a process known as "recess appointments" if GOP senators reject some of the more controversial picks for his second administration. Trump's idea is to force the U.S. Senate into a recess, then ram through nominees without Senate confirmation votes.

I an article published on November 25, The Hill's Emily Brooks reports that some GOP lawmakers in Congress are privately fuming over Trump's "recess appointments" threat.

"Under the purported plan," Brooks explains, "the House would agree to recess, and if the Senate does not act, Trump would use Article II, Section 3 authority to recess Congress…. The prospect of Trump trying to exert that authority has started to circulate among Hill Republicans, causing alarm among some of them. They worry not only about Trump prompting a constitutional crisis, but the precedent it would set."

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland), who chairs the far-right House Freedom Caucus, is vehemently opposed to Trump's "recess appointments" scheme.

Harris told The Hill, "It's absolutely constitutional. It's an actual writing in the Constitution that the president can do it."

Another House Republicans, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told The Hill, "People do not like this idea. This is a bad strategy to go down."

Andy Craig of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told The Hill that the scheme would be "norm-defying" if Trump follows through with it in 2025 and could set off a "full-blown constitutional crisis."

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, in a listicle/opinion column published on November 22, lays out four ways in which Trump could undermine the authority of Congress during his second term.

They are: (1) "expanding recess appointments," (2) "impounding appropriated funds," (3) "curbing independent agencies," and (4) "politicizing the civil service."

Marcus says of Trump's "recess appointments" threat, "This might be the most audacious of Trump's efforts to enlarge presidential authority at the expense of Congress…. The Constitution explicitly grants presidents 'power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.' That means a recess appointee can serve for as long as two years without Senate confirmation. But this is a horse-and-buggy-era exception to the general rule requiring that the president nominate senior officials 'by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.'"

Read Emily Brooks' full report for The Hill at this link and Ruth Marcus' Washington Post column here (subscription required).

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