In the span of exactly one year, Pete Buttigieg will have gone from serving as the mayor of the 310th largest city in the country to the secretary of transportation, assuming Republican senators such as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski decide to confirm such a relatively low-stakes nomination.
Joe Biden had reportedly considered his former primary rival to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs and then to head to Beijing as our ambassador to China. If all three of the positions the president-elect had in mind for Buttigieg seem completely unrelated, that’s because they are. Just four years after the Left went apoplectic over President Trump nominating Elaine Chao to run the Transportation Department, Biden went ahead and nominated a guy whose greatest transportation feat until now was making South Bend’s downtown streets more pedestrian-friendly.
Considering that the best-case scenario for Republicans is razor-thin control of the Senate, swing voters such as Collins and Murkowski will likely choose to spend their political capital blocking Biden’s far worse nominees, including Neera Tanden and Xavier Becerra. Luckily for the mayor, the mood in Washington will be amenable enough to big infrastructure deals that any reasonably smart politician, as Buttigieg is, will have a decent enough time running the Transportation Department. But Buttigieg’s nomination belies the truth of Biden’s promise that our so-called return to normalcy will also include staffing the federal government with only qualified nominees, and it’s especially insulting after the total meltdown over Chao.
Trump nominated plenty of unqualified and unsuitable people to his Cabinet, but Chao was undeniably not one of them. She previously held senior positions in the Department of Transportation under two separate presidents, and her other roles involving relevant managerial experience and forging better Beltway connections included running the Peace Corps and the Department of Labor. But unlike both of Chao’s predecessors from the Obama administration, she wasn’t confirmed unanimously by the Senate, and in the context of how historically nonpartisan transportation secretary confirmations previously were, it wasn’t particularly close.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted against Chao’s confirmation, and eventual presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand did as well. While more centrist Democrats on the Hill expressed affirmative satisfaction with her nomination, the broader backlash to Chao was wildly disproportionate to her actual record as a nominee. The left-wing Sierra Club called her nomination “reckless” and “backward,” and her marriage to Mitch McConnell was used by the media to paint the frankly sexist narrative that she was only nominated as a favor to the Senate majority leader, such as an Atlantic headline referring to her solely as “McConnell’s wife.”
Elections have consequences, and Republicans cannot and should not stonewall every one of Biden’s nominations. They will have to pick their battles, and almost any nominee to run an operation as bureaucratic as the Transportation Department is simply not worth fighting. But Buttigieg’s nomination cannot be interpreted as anything other than Biden repaying a political debt to the former mayor who crucially bowed out of the Democratic primary before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden, arguably securing his eventual victory in the primary and then the White House.
