Senate leadership seems all mixed up about giving Donald Trump the power to straight up bypass Congress and appoint Matt Gaetz as his attorney general.
Ahead of Trump’s recent Cabinet picks (a crew of loyalists so unqualified it feels more like trolling than anything else), the president-elect laid out his shady plan to get them appointed without Senate approval.
“Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner,” Trump wrote Sunday on X.
Unlike typical official appointments, recess appointments don’t require a Senate vote, and allow the president to unilaterally decide who will fill a role. The appointment wouldn’t be permanent; it might only last until the end of that session, which is no more than two years. At the end of that time, the president could just renominate their pick and appoint them again.
This would be particularly useful in the case of Gaetz, an antagonistic MAGA acolyte currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct, among a slate of other charges.
CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju asked several top Republicans whether they actually supported Trump’s request for recess appointments.
Florida Senator Rick Scott, a staunch Trump ally, said that he supported Trump’s request for recess appointments. “Well I believe in recess appointments, so I was very clear,” said Scott. “And I think John Cornyn and John Thune are committed to recess appointments.”
That would have been all well and good, if Scott had won his bid to become the Senate majority leader earlier this week. But he didn’t, Thune did. And it’s not clear that Thune or Cornyn agree with Scott at all.
“Well that’s another whole issue, obviously I don’t think we should be circumventing the Senate’s responsibilities, but I think it’s premature to be talking about recess appointments right now,” Cornyn replied, when asked about possibly allowing recess appointments.
Scott claimed that he, Thune, and Cornyn had agreed on recess appointments ahead of the Senate GOP election Tuesday. Cornyn said that no such discussion had taken place.
Cornyn added that “there should not be any limitation” on the Senate’s investigation into Gaetz. Separately, he told ABC’s Rachel Scott that he “absolutely” wanted to see the ethics report on Gaetz.
As for Thune, he claimed that whether or not he would allow Trump to make recess appointments hadn’t even crossed his mind.
“I haven’t given that any thought yet,” Thune added. “I just know that the nomination isn’t formalized yet, but when it is, we’ll process it in the way we typically do and provide our advise and consent.”
On Wednesday, Thune signaled that he hoped to put nominees through standard confirmation hearings. “I’m willing to grind through it and do it the old-fashioned way,” Thune told South Dakota reporters.
Another member of Republican Senate leadership, Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, who became vice chair of the Senate GOP Policy Committee Tuesday, also pushed back on Trump’s request for recess appointments.
“I think the Supreme Court would even step in on those roles,” Lankford said, adding that he wouldn’t favor recess appointments.
Elon Musk is holding open auditions for employment at his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Applicants simply must be willing to work grueling hours for zero compensation.
DOGE made the announcement Thursday from its official account on X, writing:
We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE. We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80 hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.
Musk then quote-tweeted a message regarding the “monumental amount of tedious super-high quality work” that would be required to run the department.
“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk wrote. “What a great deal!” The billionaire attached a laughing emoji at the end of the tweet.
Musk is familiar with these kinds of absurd labor demands. He warned Twitter employees to either be “extremely hardcore” or leave when he bought the platform in 2022. He also told them they’d have to work “long hours at high intensity.” 80 percent of the staff left soon after.
Musk was one of Donald Trump’s most prominent advocates (and donors) on the campaign trail, and he hasn’t left the president-elect’s side since his victory. In return Trump gifted Musk the Department of Governmental Efficiency—or DOGE, a stale reference to an ancient internet meme—along with Vivek Ramaswamy. How the department will operate, and what the jobs there will even look like, remains to be seen.
Steve Bannon has a vision for the future, and it involves locking up MSNBC’s anchors and their producers for criticizing President-elect Donald Trump.
“You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call mom and dad tonight. ‘Hey mom and dad, you know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up,” Bannon said on his show, War Room, Wednesday.
The shocking threat came on the heels of news that Donald Trump had tapped Florida Representative Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general (a conveniently timed appointment that has the dual benefit of killing a House Ethics investigation into Gaetz’s alleged misconduct with women and minors.) That decision will effectively hand Gaetz the keys to the Justice Department during Trump’s second term—so long as the unsavvy but deferential political operative can ride the wave.
“You try to destroy Trump. You try to imprison Trump. You try to break Trump,” Bannon continued. “He’s not breakable. You couldn’t destroy him. And now he is turned on you. And he’s put a firebrand in charge of main justice—Department of Justice. And you’re going to have to live with it.”
The ex–Breitbart editor then went on to name names, calling out host Ari Melber and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann, who was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“I’ve never complained about this,” Bannon said. “Never bitched and moaned about it. Just came with the territory. I........