(Nov. 14) Republican senators should immediately kneecap the nominations of former Reps. Tulsi Gabbard and especially Matt Gaetz for top spots in President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration.
House and Senate Republican leaders likewise should signal that they won’t allow Trump to install these two unfit characters through any backdoor method. Congress should not allow itself to go into “recess” in any way that enables Trump to put anybody into office without Senate approval.
My colleague Tom Rogan already explained why Gabbard has no business being head of the nation’s intelligence apparatuses.
“If Gabbard is approved,” Rogan justly writes, “Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin will have an ideological sympathizer holding the keys to the U.S. intelligence community crown jewels.”
An extreme leftist who endorsed socialist Bernie Sanders for president, Gabbard is so hostile to U.S. intelligence services that she advocated leniency for traitor Edward Snowden, who leaked huge amounts of classified U.S. information and then defected to Russia.
Gaetz is even worse. No matter what the technical legality, or lack thereof, of Gaetz’s hard partying with late-teenagers and his payments to a friend who admittedly was engaged in underage sex trafficking, those exploits alone make him what Alexander Hamilton meant when he warned against Senate approval of “unfit characters” to executive or judicial posts. For multiple reasons, conservative former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy called Gaetz an “unconfirmable” conspiracy theorist, and he is manifestly unqualified as a lawyer who barely ever practiced law, was disciplined at least three times by the Florida Bar, and was arrested on charges of driving under the influence.
Trump’s nomination of this despicable miscreant is an insult to the public and to the Constitution.
Indeed, Gaetz is so outrageously unfit that Republican senators should not even let him reach the starting gate. He is a rare nominee whose disqualifications are so well known that no hearing is needed to know that he merits rejection. Obviously, no Democratic senator will vote to confirm him, so it will take only four Republicans in the new Senate to block him. Ten times that many should announce, forthwith, that they will vote against him…. [The full column is here.]
