It was a difficult weekend for the Trump administration as it sought to implement and defend its most controversial executive order to date, the travel ban. Fortunately for Trump, there’s a chance to reset from the executive order fiasco with Tuesday night’s announcement of his nominee for the Supreme Court seat formerly held by the late Antonin Scalia. The president has decided on a nominee, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told the press Monday, but the administration has been tight-lipped about who the selection is. There are rumors the top picks are federal circuit court judges Thomas Hardiman and Neil Gorsuch.
Whoever it is, the announcement promises to be must-see TV: Trump’s decision to announce at 8 p.m. Eastern, in prime time, is a shrewd bit of programming savvy from the entertainer-in-chief. (By contrast, Barack Obama announced both Sonia Sotomayor’s and Elena Kagan’s nominations just after 10 a.m., right in the middle of the workday. Boring!)
Invited to the White House announcement are several Republican senators in leadership and on the Judiciary committee—including Lindsey Graham, a frequent critic of Trump who voted to confirm both Sotomayor and Kagan. No word if Graham will attend the announcement, but the White House’s strategy is to have Republican senators rally around the Court nominee quickly after the announcement. If that plan succeeds, it will be a much-desired contrast to the confusion and uneasiness expressed by GOP members of Congress over the travel ban executive order. It will also serve as a counterpoint to what the White House perceives as Democratic obstructionism over Trump’s cabinet appointees and (preemptively) against the Court nominee.
Fumbling the Travel Ban
In the White House, there’s a general feeling that while the policy of restricting entry from the seven Muslim countries listed in Friday’s executive order is right, nearly everything about the public rollout could have been done better. As one senior White House official put it, they “fumbled” the outreach—to members of Congress, to the relevant departments, and even internally.
The White House remains coy about the extent to which the department secretaries were involved in the drafting of the order. “All appropriate agencies and individuals that needed to be part of the process were,” said Sean Spicer on Monday. “Everybody was kept in the loop at the level necessary to ensure that we rolled it out properly.” But no one at the White House has denied the reports that Homeland Security secretary John Kelly was not fully briefed on the order until it was being signed by President Trump at the Department of Defense. As the Associated Press reports, neither Kelly, Defense secretary James Mattis, nor Secretary of State designate Rex Tillerson “were aware of the details” until Trump signed it.
If, as administration officials argue, DHS and other departments and agencies were “touched” before the executive order, it was clearly too light. At least some among senior White House officials recognize the need for more and better outreach.
The “Monday Night Massacre” That Wasn’t
Sally Yates, an Obama administration appointee who was serving as acting attorney general, decided to take a (grand?) stand against the travel ban executive order by stating she viewed the directive as neither “wise” nor “just.” In her Monday letter to the Justice Department lawyers, Yates said the department would not defend the executive order in court so long as she was in charge.
So on Monday night, Trump promptly fired her and replaced her with U.S. attorney Dana Boente.
The outrage was swift, with liberals likening the firing to Richard Nixon’s “Saturday night massacre” when the embattled president fired the independent special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal and prompted the resignations of his attorney general and deputy attorney general. It’s a weak and lazy comparison for several reasons, not least of which is that Yates was likely on her way out the door at Justice with Jeff Sessions likely to be confirmed as attorney general. Yates was serving at the pleasure of the president, and Trump had every right to fire her, according to the law.
One-for-Two Regulations
President Trump issued another executive order on Monday, this time directing federal agencies to cut two regulations for every new regulation introduced. The libertarians at Reason are cautiously optimistic but say more must be done to roll back the federal regulatory regime effectively. Read more of their analysis here.
Song of the Day
“You Get What You Give,” by New Radicals
