WTH is Trump Trying to Recess Appoint Cabinet Members? John Yoo Explains

What the Hell Is Going On

AEI Podcasts

History, Government, News, Politics

4.4 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2024

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Many of President-elect Donald Trump’s announced cabinet nominees are well respected and will likely have an easy path to Senate approval. Others, not so much. So Trump has proposed doing something no president has ever done before: Skirting the Senate approval process altogether via recess appointments. This appointment scheme delegitimizes Trump’s cabinet picks, sets a dangerous precedent for future administrations, and is likely unconstitutional.

John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford University. Yoo was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the general council of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department. His most recent book is The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court (Regnery, 2023) with Robert Delahunty.

Read the transcript here.

Subscribe to our Substack here.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute.
0:03.0	If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on?
0:01.1	Who in God's name
0:21.7	knows what it's all about. Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. And I'm Mark Tieson. Welcome to our podcast. What
0:33.7	the hell is going on? Mark, I love this name all the more now that Donald Trump has returned to us. What the hell is going on? Mark, I love this name all the more now that Donald Trump has returned to us. What the hell is he doing now?
0:42.7	Well, first of all, the thing we have to talk about, we have to have a conversation here, Danny. Are we going to bring our old intro back? Are we going to keep this one? Or are we going to go back to the old Trump that the famous Alexa came up with?
0:54.4	Oh, gosh. I know. I like the current gosh. It was such a great intro. I know. I think, you know what we should do for the next couple of weeks? We should go back and forth and use the different one. Next episode, do the All-Trump one, and then see, let our listeners vote on it and tell us what they think. Okay. I like the mixed one personally,
1:12.5	because there's so much Democratic what the hell as well. Let's be honest. That's true.
1:17.2	That's true. Maybe Ben can come up with a hybrid because we won't need Biden's voice in there
1:23.1	anymore. Ben is going to quit soon. There's no question about that. And no, we won't need Biden.
1:29.4	So let's talk a little bit about the Constitution. Yes. What is that document anyway?
1:37.2	Why does it matter? All it's there to do is tie the hands of our legitimately elected presidents
1:42.8	who are making America great again, right?
1:45.9	Exactly. So Donald Trump's transition team has come up with a scheme that they are trying to do,
1:50.7	which is to get Congress to go out of session into recess and allow them to appoint their entire
1:57.3	cabinet and all the officials into recess appointments without Senate confirmation, without
2:03.1	any scrutiny, and allow them to serve two years. They just want to get the ground running
2:07.2	and make that happen. If the Senate doesn't want to go along with that, they're talking about
2:11.8	using Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution, which holds that in the event of a dispute between the House
2:18.5	and Senate over whether to recess, the president could put Congress into recess and then do
2:23.7	the maneuver I just described. So even if John Thune, as his first act as the new majority
2:28.8	leader, doesn't choose to eviscerate the Senate's advice and consent power as his first
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from AEI Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of AEI Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.