“Advice and Consent” in the age of President Donald Trump

“He (the president) shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur, and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.”

-United States Constitution, Article II, Section 2, paragraph 2

Every single President of the United States, going back to the very first President, George Washington, has had the power to appoint members of their cabinet with the advice and consent of the United States Senate…that is, until the election of Donald J. Trump.

Trump’s election and his presidency has brought about a fundamental change in his ability to form his cabinet, appoint ambassadors and heads of departments- NOT for legal, but rather for political reasons.

Simply stated, Democrat members of the United States Senate so object to his election and his presidency, that they have decided to do everything they can to block the president from his constitutional authority to appoint even his own cabinet. Sadly, these Democrats are aided and abetted by at least one Republican Senator- a Senator who voted to approve both of Barack Obama’s Secretaries of State, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

That Senator is Rand Paul (R-KY).

Paul’s intended refusal to approve the appointment of Mike Pompeo to be the nation’s seventieth Secretary of State, along with the absence of anti-Trump John McCain (R-AZ), will mean that Pompeo’s appointment will not likely make it out of committee, and it is an open question as to whether or not Pompeo’s appointment will be brought to the floor of the Senate for an up or down vote. Bad enough that, since the election of Donald Trump, cabinet and ambassador appointments have become a strictly partisan undertaking- but when a president’s own party works hand-in-hand with Democrats to block their own president from making such appointments, it is little wonder why this president has such contempt for ‘the swamp” that has become our nation’s capital.

While Senator Paul can pontificate all that he wants about his reasons for blocking Pompeo’s appointment, the fact that he voiced little or no opposition to the appointments of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry shows that he is nothing more than the south end of a northbound horse whose sole purpose is to garner media attention that he would otherwise not attract. In this same way so-called “maverick” John McCain (R-AZ) frequently has placed his own thirst for media attention above and beyond the interests of his country.

Enough is enough.

It has become apparent that a majority of Congressmen and Senators, alike, would rather see the President fail than to see the country succeed- here at home and around the world.

Take for instance North Korea. However remote the possibility that North Korea will abandon its nuclear weapons and de-nuclearize the Korean peninsula, the fact that such an undertaking is even being mentioned is a first for any U.S. President since they began this quest, going back to the end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency. The fact is that Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama all failed, and failed miserably, to stymie the nuclear ambitions of North Korea. Now that such an achievement might well be in the offing for President Trump, leave it to the anti-Trump weasels in the United States Senate, from both parties, to block the President from the most important and consequential international achievement since Ronald Reagan brought about the end of the Soviet Union under his successor’s presidency.

Mike Pompeo, who graduated first in his class from West Point and first in his class from Harvard Law School, in eminently qualified to be Secretary of State. His management of the Central Intelligence Agency as CIA Director has been exemplary, in the wake of the directorship of his corrupt predecessor, John Brennan, and he has gained the trust of President Trump in providing the president with most of the daily security briefings since his appointment to that post. During the Easter weekend, Pompeo secretly went to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong Un, to prepare for the meeting between Kim and President Trump, slated for late May or early June- the first between a U.S. President and a North Korean dictator- ever.

Yet, leave it to a diminutive little twerp like Rand Paul to try to get in the way of all of this- just to make a point about his view of enhanced interrogation techniques and questioning the wisdom of President George Bush’s decision to put American troops into Iraq…such are the platitudes of a man who has about as much credibility as Obama’s weak and feckless Secretaries of States, Clinton and Kerry. So invested is Paul in his intention to block Pompeo’s appointment, that he is beginning to soften his long-held opposition to the disastrous JCPOA agreement entered into by the Obama administration, which gave billions of dollars to Iran in exchange for nothing of substance.

If ever a cabinet-level appointment was prescient and necessary to the critical times in which we live, President Trump must have a Secretary of State who can duly represent the United States, and one who he can trust…but don’t tell that to Rand Paul, or the Democrats in the Senate who would rather abide a continuation of North Korea’s nuclear threat than to hope for success on the part of President Trump.

Advice and consent? Yeah, right.

 

-Drew Nickell, 23 April 2018

© 2018 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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