The Framers established the requirement for Senate advice and consent to presidential nominations to safeguard democracy from a “despotic” president. As the Supreme Court explained in Freytag v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the “power to appoint officers” was the “most insidious weapon of 18th-century despotism.”

Justice Antonin Scalia echoed this theme in NLRB v. Noel Canning, the leading (and unanimously decided) case on appointments made during congressional recesses. Former Justice David Souter similarly pointed out that the Senate’s power to disapprove nominees limits presidential “wrongdoing” by checking “arbitrary power” in Weiss v. United States.

In NLRB v. Southwest General, Justice Clarence Thomas cited the “serious risk for abuse and corruption posed by permitting one person to fill every office of the government.” He explained that the Framers had “lived under a form of government” that did not check arbitrary exercises of executive power. They realized that “liberty could only be preserved by ensuring that the powers of government could never be consolidated in one body.”

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), however, has indicated that the Senate should abandon its vital checking function, allowing........

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