| Even as Donald Trump continues holding the nation’s political culture hostage, the most pressing question in Washington concerns the likely composition of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet. With Democrats facing long odds in the pair of pending Senate runoffs in Georgia, the executive branch is likely to be the center of substantive liberal policymaking over the next four years. And as New Republic contributor Samuel Adler-Bell notes, the scrum for influence within Biden’s Cabinet is now kicking off. Already, Biden insiders have leaked that the incoming administration might “consider limiting prospective Cabinet members to those Mitch McConnell can live with,” according to a report in Axios. And an early roster of advisers aiding with the presidential transition at the Office of Management and Budget features former Airbnb, Lyft, and Amazon executives—not exactly heartening news for a grassroots Democratic constituency keen for a long-overdue reckoning with the scourge of inequality and the forces of Big Tech monopoly. |
| However, liberal activist groups are determined to exert pressure on Team Biden to tack leftward in its appointments—especially since many of them are still smarting from the profound letdown that was the incoming Obama Cabinet in 2009. As Adler-Bell reports, In 2008, people of color, liberals, and union members powered Barack Obama to victory, only for him to fill his Cabinet with bankers, Wall Street–friendly lobbyists, and moderates who sabotaged a more aggressive response to the financial crisis and sanded the populist edges off Obama’s powerful campaign message. “We were flat-footed during the transition, and that’s when the die was cast,” said David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, a left group focused on combating corporate and monopoly power. “This time is different. We’re watching. We’re mobilized. We can’t let this White House be staffed by the same plutocrats.” One way to advance this agenda is to push for Biden to use recess appointments and the Vacancy Act to staff his Cabinet without McConnell’s malign influence. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer could be a valuable ally in such a battle—particularly because he’s mindful of the prospect that he could face a primary challenge from the left when he’s up for reelection in 2022. In a meeting with the left activist group Indivisible, Schumer reportedly agreed to push for a left-leaning Biden Cabinet—and endorsed the use of the Vacancies Act to aid the cause. It’s not, after all, as if close coordination with Schumer’s counterpart, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is going to yield anything viable. “McConnell and his colleagues are going on TV—right now—amplifying President Trump’s claims that Joe Biden has stolen the election,” Waleed Shahid of the Justice Democrats told Adler-Bell. “They’re delegitimizing the next four years of his presidency. For Democrats to hint that they would then allow Mitch to have a say in their priorities is absolutely insane.” Recess and Vacancy Act appointments come with political risks of their own. To engineer the former strategy, House Speaker Pelosi would need to trigger a falling-out over adjournment procedure with McConnell, permitting Biden to sweep in with his own adjournment to-do list. McConnell and Trump made extensive use of recess appointments in this fashion, but since Biden ran forcefully as an anti-Trump leader, recess machinations could plunge his administration into charges of hypocrisy and Trumpian intrigue. Still, if such hardball tactics are the price of getting the people’s business done, there may not be much of a choice here. “The Recess Appointments Clause and the federal vacancies law both exist for a simple reason: to ensure that the executive branch can be staffed and the president can do his job,” constitutional scholar (and TNR contributor) Brianne Gorod told Adler-Bell. “If President Biden ends up facing a Republican-controlled Senate that prioritizes obstruction over governance, there should be nothing surprising about President Biden using the tools the law gives him to ensure he can do the job the American people elected him to do.” In other words, seizing the initiative from an obstruction-minded Senate is, in this glum division of power, simply pragmatic politics. Mitch McConnell has long been comfortable with this view of things, and for a Biden administration to succeed, Joe Biden and Charles Schumer may well have to go and do likewise. —Chris Lehmann, editor |
