Free Republic

Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Ron DeSantis includes this exchange about the Supreme Court:HH: Now in terms of the judges that you will bring to bear on this, former President Trump hit three home runs with his Supreme Court appointments. Are you going to make the same kind of pledge to the Republicans as you go around the country that your judges will be like the Trump judges?RD: Well, actually, I would say we’ll do better than that. I mean, I respect the three appointees he did, but none of those three are at the same level of Justices Thomas and...

Hundreds of people serving on the Pentagon’s 42-civilian advisory boards were forced to resign on Tuesday upon the orders of Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The move effectively purged many Trump appointees who were put in place in the final days of the Trump administration. While the resignations were reportedly part of a broader review ordered by Austin, the Pentagon’s top spokesman did acknowledge that move was prompted by the 11th-hour appointments by Trump. “The Secretary was deeply concerned with the pace and the extent of recent changes to memberships of department advisory committees,” said John Kirby, the Pentagon’s...

Sessions Barr Gorsuch Kavanaugh Barrett Mark Esper Gina Haspel McMaster Bolton Tillerson Mattis Chao DeVos Miles Taylor [anonymous] Scaramucci and?

Though President Donald Trump is expected to leave office in January, not all of his political appointees will follow. That’s due to a longtime, controversial practice called “burrowing” in which political appointees — whose jobs could easily be nixed by an incoming president — transition to more secure civil service positions, many times within the agencies they once helped lead. A review by the News4 I-Team found more than a dozen Trump appointees have already “burrowed” into new positions this year alone, joining the rank and file who will serve under President-elect Joe Biden. They include a high-ranking official at...

American Thinker Trump's Senate Saboteurs By Fran Fawcett Peterson March 3, 2017 The Republican-controlled Senate is to blame for only 17 Trump confirmations so far. Trump has 1242 more needing Senate approval, or the number may be as low as 500, it's hard to pin down. Republicans are to blame because they are in the majority and thus in control of the schedule. Given the Senate’s vacation schedule, officially “state work period,” there is an almost impossibility of Trump getting all 1242 appointees confirmed in four years even if they worked round the clock. If the figure is only 500...

Obama's "echo chamber" lives on and the media are still buying... In an article on the Atlantic website, a former Obama White House staffer explains why she resigned from the Trump White House after only eight days. . . . Hers was the second story in less than a week in which a government official explained that they’d resigned because of Trump’s policies. Ned Price, a CIA analyst who worked at the Obama White House, authored a cri de coeur for the Washington Post to explain why his disagreements with Trump’s policies prompted him to leave government service. “To be...

Democrats are breaking records for stalling and denying President Trump his slate of top cabinet appointees. The childish “Party of No” has only approved three of Trump’s appointees as of Monday. ArSquared The Daily Signal noted that this obstructionism from Democrats was “unprecedented” and Sen. McConnell reiterated the same point during a floor speech last week: “I urge colleagues to remember that we worked with the administration of former President Obama after he was first inaugurated…We confirmed seven members of his Cabinet the day he took office, and nearly the entire Cabinet was filled within two weeks.” On Tuesday Democrats...

Donald Trump has embarked on an unprecedented purge of government officials appointed by President Barack Obama in a bid to wipe the slate clean ahead of his inauguration. Scores of presidential appointees, from ambassadors in far flung capitols to two nuclear security chiefs to the head of Washington's National Guard, will be leaving their posts on Friday at noon, having received unexpected orders to do so, just as Trump takes office as one of the most unpopular and scandal-ridden incoming presidents in history. While his recent predecessors were swept toward inauguration day on a tide of goodwill, Mr Trump has...

Republicans on Sunday defended their party against Democratic complaints that Congress is being forced to consider nominees for Donald Trump’s administration without completed ethics reviews. “All of these little procedural complaints are related to their frustration in having not only lost the White House, but having lost the Senate,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “I understand that,” he added, “but we need to sort of grow up here and get past that.” …

Senate Democrats are not going to be able to block Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions bid to become attorney general. And they can’t do much to stop Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo from assuming the helm of the CIA. And they have only themselves to thank for it. That’s because exactly three years ago, the Democratic Senate majority — led by Harry Reid (Nev.) — rammed through controversial rules fundamentally changing the way the Senate does business. They unleashed in November 2013 what’s called the “nuclear option” allowing senators to approve by a simple majority all presidential appointments to the executive branch...

If he wins the presidency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would seek to purge the federal government of officials appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama and could ask Congress to pass legislation making it easier to fire public workers, Trump ally, Chris Christie, said on Tuesday. Christie, who is governor of New Jersey and leads Trump's White House transition team, said the campaign was drawing up a list of federal government employees to fire if Trump defeats Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 presidential election. ... Trump's transition advisers fear that Obama may convert these appointees to civil...

pulled quote: "... Since Roosevelt’s Presidency, the Executive Office of the President has gained about 2,000 people, and the number of political appointees has increased to more than 7,000. Setting aside White House staffers and about 3,000 part time Presidential appointments, each new President fills about 3,000 positions with his or her partisans. To lead departments and agencies, contemporary Presidents make appointments to about 800 full time PAS positions, which require Senate confirmation (not including US attorneys, US marshals, or ambassadors, which are also PAS). In addition, each new administration can appoint partisans amounting to 10% of the Senior Executive...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Some of President Barack Obama's political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press. The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees' email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more...

It wasn't surprising that Big Labor Democrats would choose a labor union lawyer to present the White House talking points to justify his unconstitutional appointments of National Labor Relations Board members. However, when the labor concluded her opening remarks saying that congress having hearing regarding unconstitutional appointments made them shills for the 1%, she lost a lot of credibility. If she any credibility left after her opening statements, it was soon to be destroyed as were the White House talking points that she was shilling. Elizabeth Reynolds the lawyer from Allison, Slutsky & Kennedy was questioned by South Carolina Congressman...

A private jet owned by a North Texas company has been impounded for the past 2 1/2 weeks and its passengers and crew detained by the Congolese government in central Africa, where officials say it was used to smuggle gold from rebel territories in the nation's eastern provinces. The plane was leased by Southlake Aviation, based in suburban Dallas-Fort Worth, to a subsidiary of CAMAC International, The Dallas Morning News reported in its Sunday editions. CAMAC company is owned by Kase Lawal, a Nigerian-born Houston oil tycoon an appointee of President Barack Obama to the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy...

President Barack Obama signed a bill Friday evening that would exempt some senior-level presidential appointees from Senate confirmation. Sponsored by Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer and cosponsored by Republicans and Democrats, the bill, now law, weakens the power of the legislature and strengthens the executive branch, critics have warned. The bill skated through the Senate three months after being introduced in 2011 and was passed by the Republican-controlled House 216-116 in July. The law now allows Obama and future presidents to name appointees to senior positions in every branch of the administration, from the Department of the Treasury to the Department...

A congressional panel grilled NASA chief Charlie Bolden today (July 12) on Capitol Hill, repeatedly asking him why the space agency has yet to choose a design for its next-generation heavy-lift rocket. Last year Congress gave NASA until mid-January 2011 to pick a design for the rocket, known as the Space Launch System, that will carry astronauts on deep space missions. NASA still has not made an official decision, and members of the House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space and Technology took Bolden to task. "We've waited for answers that have not come. We've pleaded for answers that have...

Freshman Congressman Jeff Landry, R-La., says that President Obama is misusing recess appointments, and he's going to do something about it. "When the president puts up nominees, they go through the confirmation process, and the senate blocks them or doesn't confirm them, and then he waits for a recess appointment just to appoint those people. He is circumventing the Constitution," said Landry on Fox News Saturday.

Less than halfway through his first term, President Barack Obama has appointed more openly gay officials than any other president in history. Gay activists say the estimate of more than 150 appointments so far — from agency heads and commission members to policy officials and senior staffers — surpasses the previous high of about 140 reached during two full terms under President Bill Clinton. "From everything we hear from inside the administration, they wanted this to be part of their efforts at diversity," said Denis Dison, spokesman for the Presidential Appointments Project of the Gay & Lesbian Leadership Institute. The...

Ah, the Obama water-carriers at the NYTimes never fail to disappoint. They describe the Obama White House decision to bypass the Senate and make 15 recess appointments while the Senate is on spring break — including radical SEIU labor lawyer Craig Becker’s appointment to the NLRB, which was rejected by the Senate last month on a 52-33 cloture vote — as a “muscular show of his executive authority.” When that authority was exercised by GOP President George W. Bush, of course, the NYTimes editorial board called it a “constitutional gimmick.”And when Bush used it in particular to appoint John Bolton...