Matt Gaetz’s nomination is a sign of contempt for the Senate
If the Gaetz nomination is some kind of clay pigeon on Trump’s part,
what’s his calculation?
November 14, 2024 at 1:28 p.m. EST
This isn’t a president’s Cabinet. The list of Donald
Trump’s nominations is starting to read more like a fantasy draft put together
in the hotel bar during a Conservative Political Action Conference.
What the president-elect has done with his latest round of
picks, especially his jaw-dropping selection of Matt Gaetz to be attorney
general, is offer a middle finger to the Senate.
Count me as hopeful that this will never get as far as a
vote on the floor of the chamber. It would put a provocateur and conspiracy
theorist who was the subject of a federal sex-trafficking
investigation in charge of the nation’s
criminal justice apparatus.
I’m far from certain, mind you, that the Senate will stand
up as it needs to. But I remain optimistic that a vestigial backbone still
exists in the institution in which the framers of the Constitution invested the
role of advising on and
consenting to the appointment of “Ambassadors, other public Ministers and
Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United
States.”
To head off this nomination, it would take only four of
next year’s 53 Senate Republicans to make it clear, publicly or privately, that they
will not vote for Gaetz. (This assumes JD Vance, as vice president, would break a 50-50 tie and confirm
him.)
The Senate’s incoming majority caucus showed it was not
entirely supine to Trump and his base on Wednesday, when it selected Sen. John Thune (South Dakota) to replace Mitch McConnell (Kentucky)
as its next leader. Thune is an institutionalist who actively worked to thwart
Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020. Sen. Rick Scott (Florida), who had
been the favorite of leading MAGA
influencers and was reported to be Trump’s
preference, didn’t make it past the first round of balloting.
Granted, that was a secret vote, and Gaetz’s nomination
will be a public loyalty test — a dare, really, on Trump’s part. But the early
stunned reactions from senators have not been promising for Gaetz’s
chances. “He’s got a lot of work to get 50,”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said.
No presidential Cabinet nominee has been defeated by a
Senate floor vote since 1989, when it rejected one of its own, John Tower (R-Texas), to be George H.W. Bush’s defense
secretary. But every recent president has seen one or more have to withdraw
from the process before it gets to that. In Trump’s first term, that happened
to four of his selections.
Gaetz has already resigned his seat in the House, where he
represented Florida, but that probably has less to do with Trump’s nomination
than the fact that the Ethics Committee was about to vote on releasing the
report on its investigation into allegations that he engaged in sexual
misconduct and illegal drug use and accepted illegal gifts. (Gaetz has denied
the accusations, and the Justice Department decided not to prosecute him after
its own probe into whether he had trafficked a 17-year-old girl.)
Gaetz’s departure from the House ends the ethics
investigation, but the committee still can — and should — release the report.
And he certainly will not be missed by most of his colleagues.
Politico has reported that Gaetz was not on the short list for attorney
general that aides put before Trump, but that the president-elect was
dissatisfied with those who were. The idea to spring Gaetz on the Senate,
Politico wrote, was hatched just hours before it was announced, as Trump’s
plane headed to Washington on Wednesday. Gaetz was among the passengers.
So if the Gaetz nomination is actually some kind of clay
pigeon on Trump’s part, what’s his calculation? The incoming president has made
no secret of his particular fixation on the Justice Department, which indicted
him on dozens of felony charges, and his intention to turn the agency into an
instrument of his will and retribution.
It may be that he wants to put something so outrageous on
the Senate’s appetizer plate that whatever he serves up for the main course
actually looks palatable.
This could also be the case with some of his other dubious
selections, including Tulsi Gabbard, who has spouted Russian talking points on Ukraine, to be
director of national intelligence, and demonstrably unqualified Fox News host Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon.
Or there might be no calculation at all. This might
actually be the cast of belligerent and incompetent — but unblinkingly loyal —
government officials that Trump intends to build. Senators have a duty before
them. Let’s hope we can count on them to do it.
The central argument behind the
Gaetz nomination: Democrats are worse
Column by Philip Bump
November 14, 2024 at 10:25 a.m. EST
To understand why President-elect Donald Trump nominated former (as of
Wednesday afternoon) Florida congressman Matt Gaetz to serve as attorney general in
his upcoming administration, you don’t need to look much further than Trump’s
announcement.
The statement describes
Gaetz as a William & Mary College of Law graduate and a “deeply gifted and
tenacious attorney,” both offered to check the most basic box the job would
seem to demand. (“Is the nominee an attorney?”) And then we get to Gaetz’s real
qualifications.
“Few issues in America are more important than ending the
partisan Weaponization of our Justice System,” the announcement states. “Matt
will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal
Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in
the Justice Department. On the House Judiciary Committee, which performs
oversight of DOJ, Matt played a key role in defeating the Russia, Russia,
Russia Hoax, and exposing alarming and systemic Government Corruption and Weaponization.”
Setting aside the hyperactive capitalization, it’s worth
pointing out that the priorities identified here are broadly imaginary. The
reference to “weaponized government” is rooted in the prosecution of Trump for
attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and for failing
to turn over classified documents when requested. The “badly-shattered” faith
in the Justice Department is a function of Trump’s relentless bad-mouthing of
the institution for having the temerity to investigate him at all.
That includes the investigation into whether Trump or
people on his 2016 campaign attempted to aid the Russian effort to boost his
candidacy. His patter about the probe being a “hoax” is well-worn by now, but
the investigation was predicated on real concerns and
ultimately found multiple points of contact between Trump allies and Russian
actors. But casually calling it a hoax was a surefire way to earn Trump’s
blessing, so Gaetz and many others did so without qualms.
But this is the pitch: Gaetz will undo the things that
Trump said happened, even if they didn’t.
And that means undoing things that Trump and his allies
don’t want to happen, even if they shouldn’t be undone. One person close to
Trump explained to Axios that the Gaetz
appointment was meant to “stop [things] like this,” referring to an FBI search of the
home of the CEO of Polymarket, a betting market that became prominent during
the 2024 presidential election. A statement from the company called the search
“obvious political retribution” for … correctly indicating that Trump would
win.
Just as politics was the central conduit through
which Trump battled his own indictments, Trump-loyal individuals and
organizations (or those who can conceivably present themselves as such) may see
their own legal problems go away. Because, you know, it’s just “weaponization.”
Allies of Trump offered variants on this argument when
defending the Gaetz pick. It wasn’t just that the Trump-loyal Floridian would
bull-in-a-china-shop the Justice Department, it was that the bar for what
qualifies as a good attorney general had already been lowered by Democratic
appointees.
Vice President-elect JD Vance took this
tack in promoting the Gaetz nomination on social media.
“The main issue with Matt Gaetz is that he used his office
to prosecute his political opponents and authorized federal agents to harass
parents who were peacefully protesting at school board meetings,” he wrote. Then: “Oh wait, that’s actually Merrick
Garland, the current attorney general.”
Garland did oversee the prosecution of a political opponent
of his boss, President Joe Biden — but only after that political opponent
attempted to subvert the 2020 election and only after he refused to respond to
a subpoena for material marked as classified. The Justice Department has
historically engaged in dubious prosecutions, certainly. But the public
evidence for pursuing the narrow federal charges Trump faced is pretty robust.
As for the harassing of parents, that’s more MAGAland
fiction. Protests at school board meetings early in Biden’s administration at
times spilled over into threats against school officials. The Justice
Department released a statement saying
that violent threats would be addressed. This was slowly twisted into the
talking point Vance offers: that by stating that violent threats were
unacceptable, the Justice Department was targeting parents at school board
meetings.
But that’s Vance’s defense. Oh, you think Gaetz is bad?
Well, no, he’s good relative to a straw man who vaguely resembles Garland.
On Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) offered
a similar take.
“I’m telling my Democratic friends: Elections have
consequences, whether you like it or not,” he said — suggesting that Gaetz
deserved consideration if only because he was the president-elect’s nominee.
“You’re accusing Matt of doing the very thing that you
did,” he continued. “Matt Gaetz didn’t lie under oath. Matt Gaetz did not sign
[Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)] warrants that were based on
Russian disinformation. So we’re going to give the president a chance to put
his people forward. To every Republican: Give Matt a chance.”
Graham’s pitch was noticeably unenthusiastic; “give him a
chance” is hardly the same as “get this done.” Again, though, notice the
reliance on how Gaetz compares to others. Gaetz didn’t sign the FISA warrants
to which Graham refers — but, then, neither did Garland. They were signed in
2016 and 2017 as the Justice Department sought to surveil Carter Page, a former
adviser to Trump’s first presidential campaign. Part of the application for the
warrants depended on information compiled
in a dossier of reports assembled by researcher Christopher Steele.
You may remember elements of that preceding paragraph from
the years-long fight over the Russia investigation. The Carter Page FISA
warrants play an outsize role in the effort to undermine the validity of the
investigation, for the simple reason that they provide one of the few points of objective criticism of the
process. (There’s not really a question, though, that Page’s ties to Russia were
worthy of investigation.) And here’s Graham, using that issue to defend the
Gaetz nomination. Not because he’s above reproach but because, hey, he could be
worse?
It’s reactionary. Trump’s nomination is a reaction to his
sincere irritation at facing a broad array of investigations. His supporters’
defenses of the nomination are often rooted in the idea that the standard for
service as attorney general had already deteriorated thanks to Democratic
nastiness.
Remove the lens through which Trump considers the
administration of justice, though, and the nomination looks very different. It
looks like a nomination of a target of a federal investigation made
by a target of federal investigation with the goal of exacting revenge on
federal investigators.
