Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump to grab spotlight from Cabinet picks
1st news event in months set amid sea of hearings
WASHINGTON — Eight of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet choices are walking into Senate hearing rooms this week to explain why they should help lead the country.
But all of them can expect to be upstaged by Trump himself, who is giving his first news conference Wednesday since before winning the election.
A confluence of news events in one of Washington’s busiest weeks will make it hard for Trump’s opponents to focus national attention on any individual Cabinet battle, despite vast implications for the economy, foreign relations, immigration and other prime issues.
Trump has been adept at using his Twitter feed, staged appearances and provocative statements to divert attention from thorny problems, including a group of Cabinet choices who has inspired intense opposition from liberal groups.
He has built anticipation for Wednesday’s appearance in part by breaking with recent tradition in which presidents-elect publicly took questions within days of being declared the election winner.
The forum with reporters in New York will mark Trump’s first formal news conference since July.
And it’s hardly the only marquee political event on the docket.
FBI Director James Comey joined other intelligence officials Tuesday for his first appearance on Capitol Hill since an election that had many Democrats seething at him over the late re-emergence of the bureau’s investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled sensitive information.
President Barack Obama delivered his farewell address the same night in Chicago, making a final case for his legacy.
The GOP-controlled Senate will make its initial assault on that legacy this week as well, with a set of marathon votes that would begin the process of unraveling Obamacare.
House action on Obamacare is expected to close the week Friday.
“It’s a little bit like a whiteout in a blizzard,” said Angela Kelley, executive director of the lobbying arm of the Center for American Progress, which has teams of researchers embroiled in the confirmation battles. Trump “is a master at manipulating how the media pays attention to him.”
Democrats say Trump and Republican Senate leaders are moving too fast on the confirmation hearings for his Cabinet choices, many with great wealth and potential for conflicts of interest, who have been hastily or not fully vetted.
They point to a letter from the Government Ethics Office saying the failure of Trump’s picks to complete ethics contracts prior to their hearings that spell out how they would resolve conflicts of interest would be unprecedented in modern times.
Senate Republicans, who spent the past eight years weathering accusations of obstruction, say Democrats are bitter they lost the election and should let Trump assemble his team to ensure a smooth transition.
They note that Obama won approval for eight members of his Cabinet, plus one holdover from President George W. Bush, in time for his first day in office.
“All of these little procedural complaints are related to their frustration at having not only lost the White House, but having lost the Senate,” Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said this week on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
McConnell pledged Tuesday that a “large number” of Trump’s picks will be in place on “day one.”
Pushing Trump’s selections through quickly could prove risky for the president-elect and his party should something embarrassing turn up after they are confirmed.
“These people who say ‘Hurry up, hurry up,” it’s like having the suspicious guy behind you in the airport line and telling the TSA to hurry up,” said Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer for Bush.
Democrats scored a partial victory Monday when Republicans agreed to delay what would have been a ninth hearing this week, for Betsy DeVos, the billionaire whom Trump has chosen to lead the Department of Education.
DeVos will testify before the Senate’s health, education, labor and pensions committee next week.
Two others were removed from the Wednesday docket, which had been especially crowded, forcing senators to hopscotch between hearings.
But Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer insisted that the delay for DeVos had nothing to do with a lack of vetting, dismissing Democrats’ complaints.
“This is a political tactic,” he told reporters.