Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Part I

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Advice and Consent: Why Do Some Presidential Appointees Require Senate Confirmation?

Well, a very important process is now underway in the United States Senate. Respective committees are going to be holding hearings for President Trump’s intended nominations for significant appointed positions that require Senate confirmation, most importantly cabinet positions. And so you’re looking at the Attorney General of the United States plus several secretaries. And this begins with some of the most important, including the hearings that began yesterday for the confirmation of Pete Hegseth as the next Secretary of Defense, and Pam Bondi as the next Attorney General of the United States.

Now here’s an interesting point. These individuals are not yet actually, in a formal sense, nominees for these offices. They’re not yet appointees to these offices, and that’s because only a President of the United States can make these appointments, and that means that President Trump, President-elect Trump, former President Trump, about to enter a new term, cannot officially make these nominations or appointments until he assumes the office with the oath of office on Inauguration Day next week. But, nonetheless, over the course of the last several decades, the Senate has begun holding these hearings in anticipation of a formal nomination, and especially when it comes to some of the most important positions in the cabinet. Attorney General and Secretary of Defense are very much on the front line of that priority simply because of the needs of national defense and, of course, of law enforcement and the regulation of law in the United States. So it’s understandable why those positions came first.

Today, in the United States Senate, the respective committees will also be considering other nominees, including Florida Senator, Marco Rubio, as the intended next Secretary of State of the United States. As I said before, the Secretary of State has first-among-equals rank in the entire cabinet. The Secretary of State is in the line of succession. The Secretary of State represents the United States of America officially and legally. As I often point out, most Americans don’t know that even President Richard Nixon didn’t know how to resign his office until it was determined that, constitutionally, he should write a letter of resignation to the Secretary of State of the United States. Sometimes you learn things constitutionally in the midst of an emergency.

But before turning to the actual hearing concerning the nomination of Pete Hegseth yesterday, let’s consider how the process works. The process, basically, has four or five steps, depending upon how you want to enumerate them. 

First of all, the President-elect or President of the United States indicates what nomination he or she intends to make. At this point, of course, it has been entirely a question of he. And as you look at that constitutional responsibility, it takes us back, indeed, to the text of the Constitution, in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, on Advice and Consent. 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.”

Now, that turns out to be really interesting, because there was no administrative state in the beginning of the United States. There was no bureaucracy. As a matter of fact, there was no one in the government. So when the government was established according to our Constitution, you had, of course, the separation of powers between the Executive, that is the President, the Legislative, that’s Congress, and the Judiciary, and that’s, of course, most importantly, the Supreme Court. And the Constitutional framers established, in the Presidency, the sole power of appointment. That’s a massive power. No one else can appoint persons to these roles. But, as you see, some of these roles require the advice and consent of the Senate. That has, basically, come down to the practice that the United States Senate must confirm nominations by a majority vote. Not a two-thirds majority required for a treaty, simply a majority vote.

So as you’re looking at this, you recognize there has to be a process. So the process is, at present, and this goes back to about the middle of the 20th century, the process is that a president, or in this case a President-elect, indicates whom he will nominate for these roles, and the United States Senate begins the process. Okay, how does the process go? 

Well, traditionally, at least, over the course of the last several decades, that means that a designated nominee goes and meets senators in the senators’ offices, it is a formality, but in this media age, it’s more than a formality. You have senators who immediately ask whether they support or do not support the nominee. You have a lot of politics going into this, but there are also, assuredly, some genuine conversations that take place.

After that, comes the stage of ethics review. And this is now required by statutory law. The Senate requires certain background checks, in terms of ethics, when it comes to nominees for the Senate-confirmed positions. And even in recent days, it has become clear that Democrats, and the minority in the Senate, and, of course, generally opposed to the Trump Administration coming into office, it’s demanding that all members of the respective committees receive all of these investigative reports. But that, at least, at this point, is not happening.

The next step is the work of Senate staff and then the holding of hearings. Senate staff provides background for the individual members of the Senate. And as you see, the senators sitting in their respective committees, they are basically working off of staff work. That staff work has indicated the direction that they ought to take their questioning, and sometimes that staff work is done in concert with other senators of the same party.

The next step after the hearings, and the hearings, by the way, have also shifted in emphasis, because throughout most of American history, Americans didn’t know the hearings were being held, and never knew a single fact of anything that came out in the hearings themselves. These days, in the age of omnipresent, it seems, video, the reality is that Americans are watching. At least, politically engaged Americans are watching. And that means the politicians see themselves as necessarily scoring points in the midst of all of this. That doesn’t necessarily serve democracy, but this is exactly what our Constitution requires.

Eventually, the Senate must vote. And again, it is a simple majority vote that is necessary for confirmation to these positions. There is also a back door, in terms of the Constitution, which allows for an interim appointment and even what’s called a recess appointment. When the Senate is recessed, a president may make an appointment, go around the confirmation process, but that position is only held by that person under that arrangement until the next seating of Congress. So that’s a very interesting development.

One of the threats made by the Trump Administration or the incoming administration is that if the Senate does not play ball, it will use the recess appointments. But that has to be something held in reserve, because it would not well serve the persons appointed to be in a questionable position in terms of a recess appointment of that nature. But this is how the confirmation process works, at least, for the top positions, because there are about a thousand positions that require Senate confirmation, and the Senate does not hold public hearings on all of those nominations. They start at the top, and we can understand why the priority would work that way.

Part II

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Pete Hegseth’s Confirmation Hearing: The Defense Hearing of Trump’s Choice as Secretary of Defense Gets Interesting Fast

Well, yesterday the fireworks came mostly in the Senate confirmation hearings when the committee met to consider the nomination of Pete Hegseth as the next Secretary of Defense of the United States. Let me remind you, there’s a big four in the President’s cabinet. That means the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of the Treasury. Those are the big four positions. So that’s, generally, where the controversy is mostly directed. So the nomination, the hearings for the nomination of a US Secretary of Defense, that’s a very big deal.

And the hearing started out with fireworks. Because even as the nominees, under current Senate rules, are given the opportunity to make out rather lengthy opening statement, then every member of the respective Senate committee holding the hearings gets seven minutes uninterrupted. Now, that’s actually a lot of time, and basically that’s all that happened yesterday. Even today, as the hearings begin, there could be some very interesting developments, but yesterday things went pretty much according to script. The Armed Services Committee held the hearings, and Pete Hegseth made his statement, and then came some very interesting exchanges or, at least, interesting speeches made by members of the committee and, most importantly, democratic members of the committee who are trying to score points. But let’s just start with the beginning by saying that Pete Hegseth is a very non-traditional nominee to serve as US Secretary of Defense. 

Going back to that position, and by the way, it was for, a long time, Secretary of War. But it was the intention of the Truman Administration to put a different face on the United States in our foreign policy, and so it was changed to the Department of Defense. By the way, President Truman also changed the direction in which the eagle is facing, no longer the arrows. That was intended to be symbolic about America’s role in establishing the peace.

The controversy related to Pete Hegseth, really, is twofold. The first comes with the fact that he’s a very non-traditional nominee for this position, because he hasn’t been a Titanic figure in American business, he hasn’t been the head of a large organization. When you look at the Secretary of Defense, you think of people like Robert McNamara who held that position from 1961 to 1968. Prior to becoming Secretary of Defense, he served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Ford Motor Company. A very big job, a lot of responsibility and, by the way, a very controversial role as Secretary of Defense.

Others had served in different roles. By the way, Lloyd Austin, the current Secretary of Defense under President Biden, he was another rather non-traditional nominee in the long history of the Department of Defense, because it requires special permission from Congress for a former general officer to serve, within a reasonable amount of time, as the Secretary of Defense. You can understand that the Secretary of Defense is a civilian position, and thus it’s intended to clarify the distinction between the uniformed services and the civilian leadership.

But rather than running a big organization, Pete Hegseth has been an author, something of a celebrity and the host, or co-host, of Fox and Friends Weekend. He’s also been very outspoken in criticism of the current direction of the Pentagon, particularly under the Biden Administration. But, to be honest, in his book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Pete Hegseth goes back several decades to trace the development of what he accuses as being a woke military. Now, I have to say that an awful lot of what he says in this book is absolutely true. There is a virus of wokeness that has spread through major institutions. And even though the military has been rather resistant compared to other sectors of society, the fact is that civilian leadership has largely forced a woke agenda, at least, in terms of what could only be described as DEI initiatives. Even if it’s denied they exist, it is clear they exist.

And other issues have come up. And the reality is that President Trump, former President Trump, President-elect Trump, is very convinced that a major shakeup needs to take place in the military. Now, Pete Hegseth is also interesting for another point. He makes a sustained argument, in this book and elsewhere, that the American military has been losing ground in terms of lethality. That’s an interesting argument, and it is one that actually has widespread traction in terms of say, conservatives, and that includes major think tanks, and even university officials, and those inside the military or recently inside the military. The reduction of lethality means that the military has been used for all kinds of other purposes and its ability actually to defend the nation, well, the argument is that it’s been undermined. And so, Pete Hegseth has been making that argument and, at least, one person found the way he made the argument extremely effective. And that gets to President-elect Donald Trump.

It is really clear that he likes the way Pete Hegseth has made those arguments. He wants to break some eggs in terms of the Department of Defense. He wants a non-traditional candidate for the Secretary’s position. And that’s exactly what he’s got. But the other controversy about Pete Hegseth has to do with his character about reports of drinking and reports of, of course, even sexual abuse. But even as Pete Hegseth was in the committee room for the hearings before the Armed Services Committee, he batted back on all of these, and that led to some very interesting exchanges. 

I think the most colorful of these exchanges took place with Virginia Senator, Tim Kaine. Now remember, he was the vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, with Hillary Clinton, back in 2016. Tim Kaine went right at the designee for the Department of Defense and raised the issue of adultery. He accused him of involvement in adulterous behavior while married to his second wife, he called her wife two, after he was the father of a child by wife three. You got that right. He accuses him of committing adultery with his second wife while he’d already impregnated the woman who would become his third wife, and the senator seemed to imply that that would be a disqualification from office. Senator Kaine and other Democratic senators also raised the issue of sexual abuse. Pete Hegseth batted those back simply by saying that they were not credible accusations and that any sex he had had was consensual.

Okay? You understand how interesting it is that these issues are discussed, in a Senate confirmation hearing, for the role of the United States Secretary of Defense. Now, let me be very clear as a Christian. I want to be extremely clear. This is immoral behavior. It is behavior that undermines the integrity of marriage. Senator Kaine, basically, asked him if he had violated his marital vows repeatedly. Hegseth didn’t respond to that immediately, but the interesting thing is that Senator Tim Kaine, let’s just follow the logic, seemed to be saying that adultery is a disqualification from high office, important responsibility in the United States government.

Now, as a Christian, I am obligated to say that I believe that adultery is a grievous sin. I believe that serial adultery is just another sign of the breakdown of moral order and the subversion of marriage in our society. This is hardly model moral behavior. I am in no way arguing that that behavior can be justified. But I do want to raise the issue of moral consistency and honesty here. Because if you are looking at Senator Kaine making the argument that committing adultery disqualifies someone from public service in this kind of important role, you have to wonder how many of the nominees and the people who had served from his own party would qualify under the same conditions.

But, in response to that, I simply want to say, and I feel the obligation to say, that I believe that adultery is a grievous sin, and honestly, it is a horrible mark against one’s character, but it is hardly unusual in Washington DC. And it simply is very interesting, to me, that Senator Kaine would raise the issue, in this way, while seemingly unaware of the fact that the accusation would come against members of his own party, not to mention presidents of his own party. But then again, we’re talking not only about Bill Clinton and the White House, we’re talking about Donald Trump in terms of redefining the moral expectations of one who would serve as President of the United States, not to mention in the position of a presidential appointee.

So as an evangelical Christian, I have to say, this is not a good commentary in our society. I also have to say that we are going to have to look at the reality that the voters elected Donald Trump as President of the United States, and elected him with the anticipated agenda of appointing change agents to these roles. And that’s exactly what he is doing. And the role of the Senate, in Advice and Consent, is unlikely to extend to voting down any significant number of these nominees. And when it comes to ideas and arguments, well, a debate can be had, but the reality is that you are not likely to get any legitimate debate on deep, moral or even strategic issues when you look at the Armed Services Committee in the context of a presidential appointment hearing.

Generally, presidents mostly get their way. As a matter of fact, for a series of long decades, only one presidential nominee to this kind of position was turned down by the United States Senate. There have been others who, being investigated either by investigative agencies or, for that matter, even just the media, have withdrawn their nomination. And, of course, you had John Tower who was turned down as an appointee to be Secretary of Defense by President-elect George H.W. Bush. But, in that case, it was not only misbehavior, similar charges, by the way, in terms of alcohol and womanizing, but it was also payback, because John Tower had been in the Senate for a long time, and he had offended many of his colleagues in the Senate. And so, at least, a part of this was, undoubtedly, payback.

But we need to keep in mind that this is not about an election as to who will serve as the next Secretary of Defense of the United States, an incredibly crucial role. Instead, that election was held on November the 5th of 2024, and Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. The presidency is invested with this power of appointment, and the Senate, yes, has the power of Advice and Consent. But, at the end of the day, the election of a president means that in the main, he should gain the administration he needs in order to conduct the nation’s business. In more recent years, Hegseth has identified as an evangelical Christian, become involved in evangelical movements and, in particular, the movement in support of classical Christian education. He’s also the author of a book on the crisis in education, and it’s also a defense of classical Christian education, entitled Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation.

In recent years, Pete Hegseth has also demonstrated a commitment to his family, and to a traditional understanding of Christian morality and the role of that morality in both education and the larger society. Over the course of the next several weeks, even months, this is going to be a preoccupation of the political class and of the media.

Part III

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The Disappearing Middle of American Media Consumption: The Major Shift of Viewership From Older Media to Social Media Influencers

But it’s also important to understand that the media, as a force in American life, is changing before our eyes, as well. So we’ll shift to that and come back to the confirmation hearings as they move forward. 

I want us to think about the changing role of the media in America and, in order to think about this, just go back a matter of a few decades to the emergence of the television networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC. Together, they basically held a monopoly on television news. And over the course of a period, from about 1959 forward to about the middle of the 1970s, television news almost completely supplanted other forms of news media, most importantly, newspapers and radio, in terms of being the major influence in shaping the public’s understanding of news and developments. And so you had the iconic anchors, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley. You just go down the list. They had enormous influence over Americans, because Americans didn’t have much choice about where to get their news. It was CBS, NBC, ABC on television, everything else was marginal.

All of that stayed pretty much in place until 1980 with the development of cable systems and the emergence of what was known as CNN, the Cable News Network, under Ted Turner. And CNN started with a rather small audience, because that audience was limited to those who were cable subscribers. And even the cable systems, well, it took a while for them to spread across the United States. A lot of Americans heard about CNN before they had any ability to watch it. But CNN pioneered this kind of constant news, and as a news network, it basically did just that. It covered news 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This was something new. Now, a lot of it was very repetitive, and frankly, it still continues pretty much that way. But the reality is that CNN developed a different way of doing television news and it affected the networks, as well.

Then, over time, you had the spread of cable systems, and then, of course, the emergence of the digital age, but we’ll get to that in a minute. You had the emergence of other cable news networks, and that included Fox News, a conservative alternative created by Australian-American tycoon, Rupert Murdoch. And so, now you had a conservative alternative. Then NBC decided to start, not one, but several news channels, the most lasting of them, MSNBC. And so, as you think about the current state of televised news, you think of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC on television. And Fox News pretty much on the right, MSNBC clearly on the left, and CNN somewhere in the middle, but frankly trending rather leftward, particularly over the course of the last several years. It’s been described as MSNBC-lite by some observers. The difference between, by the way, CNN and MSNBC, on some issues, is that MSNBC basically often has programs with no conservative voice. CNN will, at least, put on the panel someone like Scott Jennings as a conservative commentator.

All right. Here’s the other development. After that came the development of the internet, and that changed everything. And, frankly, that became very clear in the 2024 election in a way that wasn’t seen before. For instance, when you looked at the campaign of Donald Trump, he was not working television the way traditional candidates had worked it. And, of course, we now know that his winning strategy was to go for podcasters and alternative media, social media, and influencers in the society. Most importantly, among podcasters, just take the illustration of Joe Rogan, who has a vast audience of millions. Frankly, Joe Rogan has more people listening to him than a lot of cable programs, put together, on a weekly basis.

When you look at 2024, something else is happening, and that is that when you think of this kind of news consumption, it’s actually overwhelmingly conservative. That’s very interesting. You look at the cable news viewership, it’s overwhelmingly conservative. At the end of 2024, the top 20 rated cable news shows, well, of them, all but six of them were on Fox News. Six of them were on MSNBC. So you had a rather significant group of liberal viewers on MSNBC, but vastly outnumbered by conservative consumers of news watching Fox News. Who wasn’t on the list, at all? CNN. Not even present. That tells you there’s a disappearing middle in terms of American media consumption.

Part IV

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A Look at the Adversary Press: The Media in Disagreement with Leadership in the White House Tends to Grow Its Base in Its Opposition

Okay, here’s another major development that’s very interesting. Rachel Maddow, very liberal host on MSNBC, has just agreed to come back on the network nightly. She’s had a weekly show for the last period. She’s coming back nightly for a hundred days. In the first 100 days of the Trump Administration, MSNBC is bringing back the very liberal commentator, Rachel Maddow, who, by the way, has an interesting background. Undergraduate degree from Stanford, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford receiving a PhD in political science. She’s undoubtedly a very smart person, and she’s also the first out lesbian holding this kind of major role in the American media. She has very pointed arguments. She enjoys political combat. And the Left, well, MSNBC is going to try to build its viewership by bringing in Rachel Maddow nightly for the first 100 days.

What does that tell you? It tells you something very interesting about the adversary media. When you have a Republican president, the liberal media can help to build their audience. They do so as the adversary press. That’s particularly true in mirror image. The conservative media have exploded under democratic administrations. That began with Bill Clinton, it certainly continued under Barack Obama, it continued then, again, under Joe Biden. And so that’s very interesting. People who feel like they are out in terms of who’s in the White House, they’re of the opposing party, they are looking for critical voices. And on the Left, that means they’re bringing back Rachel Maddow for, at least, nightly presentation for the first 100 days. After that, we presume, we’ll see.

Part V

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The Left is Lawyering Up: President-Elect Trump is Not Afraid to Sue for Defamation, and It’s Destabilizing Liberal Media

But there’s another big issue, in conclusion, having to do with the media. The New York Times reports the headline, “News Media Outlets Gird for a Hostile White House.” Well, what does that mean? It means that big media, and that means the old legacy media and the new digital medias, many of them, particularly on the Left, they are lawyering up. Why? It is because the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump is not at all hesitant to sue media outlets, and that puts them on the defensive. It also puts them on the alert. And, at this point, it’s important to recognize that the media has largely gotten a pass on these issues ever since the Sullivan decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1964. That decision said that in order for a defamation suit by a public figure to succeed in court, the person making the accusation would have to prove “actual malice” on the part of the media source.

Now, of course, that’s subjective. How do you prove actual malice? How do you prove what was in someone’s heart? Well, ever since about 1964, that’s meant that very few politicians are willing to make this a matter of litigation. Well, new on the scene, Donald Trump is quite willing to make this a matter of litigation. It’s also true that, at least, some among the conservative justices on the Supreme Court seem to be very eager for an opportunity to review the Sullivan decision. In any event, the big story here is destabilization. If you go back just a couple of decades, the liberal mainstream media largely had a monopoly hold on the American people.

That is now no longer the case, so we’re in a better position, in terms of that one issue. But also consider the fact that that destabilization means that greater responsibility falls on the American people as viewers, as listeners, as readers, as consumers of media, to determine what’s credible and what’s not, what’s true and what’s not, because the gatekeepers were largely liberal, but they were gatekeepers. You turn to a situation in which there are no gatekeepers, that means that the responsibility falls upon you. That destabilization, I think, is a very important achievement of our times, but that also puts a greater responsibility on each one of us.