No free passes for nominees
This will be a busy week in Washington, as the Senate conducts a rapid-fire confirmation hearing process of President-elect Donald Trump’s choices for top Cabinet posts.
At least nine Trump nominees will sit before Senate panels in the coming days, starting Tuesday morning with Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, who is up for attorney general.
In a normal presidential transition, the Senate would hold confirmation hearings on many of a presidentelect’s Cabinet appointees before he takes office, to minimize the time agencies are leaderless at the start of a new administration.
But keeping with this tradition has depended on these nominees to provide background information (most of which is not required by law) and submit to an ethics review (which is required, thanks to the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act).
The ethics agreements are especially important because they commit nominees to conducting the necessary divestitures, recusals and other forms of financial severance that are necessary for conducting public policy at the highest levels of government. Several of Trump’s Cabinet appointees are billionaires with wide-ranging investments and international relationships.
But this has not been a normal transition.
So far, only a fraction of Trump’s designees have submitted a complete prehearing package. In emails uncovered by NBC, Walter Shaub, director of the Office of Government Ethics, complained about a lack of cooperation from Trump’s transition team.
The White House staff runs “the risk of having inadvertently violated the criminal conflicts of interest restriction,” Shaub wrote. “If we don’t get involved early to prevent problems, we won’t be able to help them after the fact.”
Now these nominees must navigate the U.S. Senate. The Republicans hold a slim majority there, but not every Republican senator is eager to rush through hearings on Trump’s most alarming choices, like Sessions and Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil chief executive officer whom Trump has tapped for secretary of state.
Their resistance to any insufficiently vetted nominee must go further. This is not about partisan politics — it’s about obeying the law and serving the public. No senators of either party should confirm any Cabinet nominee who hasn’t completed an ethics review. No vetting, no vote.