Editorial: Trump’s cabinet nominees need extreme vetting from the Senate, not rubber stamps

Senate committees have planned hearings this week on nine of President-elect Donald Trump’s most important cabinet appointees, including his nominees for secretary of State, secretary of Defense and attorney general. On Wednesday — a day when Trump is already expected to dominate news coverage by holding his first formal news conference since July — no fewer than five confirmation hearings are likely to be in progress.

Democrats in the Senate are understandably furious that the nominees are being rushed through the confirmation process and insist they won’t receive the searching scrutiny they require. “Jamming all these hearings into one or two days, making members run from committee to committee, makes no sense,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Monday. “My big concern now is to try to be in two places at one time,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein told the Wall Street Journal.

We share the Democrats’ concern (and worry as well that the media won’t have the resources or the space to cover all the hearings adequately). Republicans point out that it’s customary for the Senate to hold confirmation hearings before a president is inaugurated and to clump proceedings together in the same week, but the fact remains that five hearings in a single day is extremely unusual.

And there were significant reasons not to rush confirmation of some of Trump’s nominees.

For one thing, some nominees haven’t completed a required ethics review. The fact that Trump’s proposed Cabinet includes so many wealthy individuals makes such a review both challenging and important. The potential conflicts of interests are enormous and the Senate needs to consider them carefully.

Furthermore, these candidates require “extreme vetting.” They could end up being unusually important and influential because the president they will serve has no government experience whatsoever and will be especially reliant on his advisors. On top of that, many of them have no experience in government to provide insight into how they would discharge public responsibilities. That is most dramatically the case with Rex Tillerson, the chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil, whom Trump has chosen to be secretary of State. Tillerson would serve as America’s chief diplomat at a time of continuing violence in the Middle East, a wave of reactionary nationalism in Europe and provocative military action by China. Yet his experience in foreign affairs is essentially that of a businessman cutting deals — and his most important contacts, with Russia, are of significant concern to senators already alarmed by Trump’s praise for Vladimir Putin.

Another reason for greater diligence by the Senate is that some Trump nominees seem uncomfortable with, if not hostile to, the core missions of the departments they have been chosen to administer.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican nominated to be attorney general, for instance, would be responsible for supervising the Civil Rights Division and enforcing what is left of the Voting Rights Act — a law he once suggested was an intrusion on states’ rights (though he voted to extend it in 2006). Civil rights activists are virtually unanimous in fearing that he wouldn’t aggressively vindicate the rights of minorities; the burden is on him to convince the Senate otherwise. He also will, and should, be asked about allegations in 1986 that he had made racially insensitive comments, a factor in the Judiciary Committee’s refusal to recommend him for a federal judgeship.

Likewise, philanthropist Betsy DeVos, whom Trump has nominated to be secretary of Education, is such a fierce advocate of charter schools and vouchers for private schools that her commitment to traditional public education has been called into question. She must not only assure senators that she recognizes the important role played by the public schools in which the vast majority of American children receive their education but also explain her plans and strategies for improving them.

There is a final reason why the Senate must not be a rubber stamp for Trump’s nominees. The president-elect has made it clear that he intends to seek advice from an influential “kitchen cabinet” of friends, family members and business associates. (On Monday it was reported that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, would join the White House as an unpaid “senior advisor.”)

Cabinet members and other officials who must receive Senate confirmation aren’t mere creatures of the president; they have an obligation to the Congress and the country to abide by the commitments they make in the confirmation process. In this unorthodox administration it is especially important that those officials be men and women of character, intelligence and good judgment.

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