From WaPo:
Democratic senators plan to aggressively target eight of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees in the coming weeks and are pushing to stretch their confirmation votes into March — an unprecedented break with Senate tradition.
Huh. I thought it was an “unprecedented break with Senate tradition” for Mitch McConnell and the Republicans to declare war on the Obama presidency on Inauguration Day in 2009, sabotage the economy to near-treasonous levels and pervert the “advice and consent” clause to brazenly steal a SCOTUS appointment. But no matter: If the Democrats are going scorched earth, I’m 100% behind them.
I’ve never been a fan of Chuck Schumer — too chummy with Wall Street and too reflexively “how high?” on Israel in my book. But he’s our incoming Senate minority leader, and if he’s ready to take the fight to the Republicans, I’m 100% behind him:
“President-elect Trump is attempting to fill his rigged cabinet with nominees that would break key campaign promises and have made billions off the industries they’d be tasked with regulating,” Schumer said in a statement Sunday confirming his caucus’s plans. “Any attempt by Republicans to have a series of rushed, truncated hearings before Inauguration Day and before the Congress and public have adequate information on all of them is something Democrats will vehemently resist. If Republicans think they can quickly jam through a whole slate of nominees without a fair hearing process, they’re sorely mistaken.”
The article says the Dems are targeting Tillerson (State), Sessions (Justice), Mulvaney (OMB), DeVos (Ed), Price (HHS), Puzder (Labor), Mnuchin (Treasury) and Pruitt (EPA). Citing senior aides, the article says the Democrats will slow-walk these nominations until springtime unless the nominees start coughing up personal financial data they’ve thus far failed to disclose.
That sounds like a good plan to me — Trump’s cabinet of billionaires, Rand cranks and Putin pals is a target-rich environment. But a spokeswoman for Senatortoise McConnell sounds sad about it:
“It’s curious that they’d [Democrats] object to treating the incoming president’s nominees with the same courtesy and seriousness with which the Senate acted on President Obama’s nominees,” Antonia Ferrier, a McConnell spokeswoman, said in an email. “Our committees and chairmen are fully capable of reviewing the incoming Cabinet nominations with the same rules and procedures as the same committees did with President Obama’s nominations.”
Un-fucking-real yet unsurprising that someone on McConnell’s staff would have the balls to bleat about comity and precedent. IMO, there are very few useful lessons we Democrats can learn from the Trump campaign, which was the very definition of a black swan event. But we should definitely steal a page from Congressional Republicans’ all-obstruction all-the-time playbook.
Resist, resist, resist. Unlike in the Republicans vs. Obama scenario, in the present case, it’s not only politically expedient, it’s the right thing to do.