November 15, 2024
Three years ago today, President Joe Biden signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, more popularly known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. That law called for approximately $1.2 trillion in spending, about $550 billion newly authorized spending on top of regular expenditures. As Biden noted today, it was “the largest investment in our nation’s infrastructure in a generation.”
In the past three years, the Biden administration launched more than 66,000 projects across the country, repairing 196,000 miles of roads and 11,400 bridges, as well as replacing 367,000 lead pipes and modernizing ports and airports. Today the administration announced an additional $1.5 billion in funding for railroads along the Northeast Corridor, which carries five times more passengers a day than all the flights between Washington, D.C., and New York City.
In his first term, Trump had promised a bill to address the country’s long-neglected infrastructure, but his inability to get that done made “infrastructure week” a joke. Biden got a major bill passed, but while the administration nicknamed the law the “Big Deal,” Biden got very little credit for it politically. Republicans who had voted against the measure took credit for the projects it funded, and voters seemed not to factor in the jobs and improvements it brought when they went to the polls last week.
This lack of credit has implications beyond the Biden administration. As economist Mark Zandi told Joel Rose of NPR, “We need better infrastructure. We should continue to invest. But that's going to be hard to do politically because lawmakers are seeing what's happening here and they’re not getting credit for it.”
Meanwhile, President-elect Trump has been rapidly naming people he intends to nominate for his cabinet, and it is not going well. As Brian Tyler Cohen wrote on Bluesky: “The same people who’ve spent the last several years decrying ‘unqualified DEI hires’ are now shoehorning through Cabinet nominations who can’t even pass a basic background test.”
Cohen was not joking; Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen, Holmes Lybrand, and Kristen Holmes of CNN reported today that Trump’s transition team is skipping background checks by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, claiming that they are slow and intrusive.
But that lack of background checks has already mired Trump’s picks in controversy.
Trump has said he would nominate Pete Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran and co-host on the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, to become the secretary of defense. Since that announcement, news has broken that a fellow service member who was the unit’s security guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists. Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations.
News broke today that a woman accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her after a Republican conference in Monterey, California, in 2017. According to Michael Kranish, Josh Dawsey, Jonathan O’Connell, Dan Lamothe, and John Hudson of the Washington Post, the woman who made the allegation said the alleged victim had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Hegseth.
Now the transition team fears more revelations. “There’s a lot of frustration around this,” a member of the transition team told the Washington Post reporters. “He hadn’t been properly vetted.”
Causing even more headaches today for the transition team was Trump’s appointment of former Florida representative Matt Gaetz to become the United States attorney general. Immediately after Trump said he would nominate Gaetz, the representative resigned his congressional seat, forestalling the release of a House Ethics Committee report concerning allegations of drug use and that Gaetz had taken a minor across state lines for sex.
It is reported that the victim, who was a seventeen-year-old high-schooler at the time, testified before the committee.
After spending an evening with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that publishing the report would be “terrible” and that he would “strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report because that’s not the way we do things in the House.”
This, despite the fact that, as historian Kevin Kruse noted, “[f]or years now, the right has been accusing Democrats of running a shadowy conspiracy to protect politicians who are sex predators.” And, in fact, the House Ethics Committee did release a report on Representative William Boner (D-TN) in 1987 for allegations of corruption after he had already resigned the office to become mayor of Nashville.
And then there is Trump’s tapping of former Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence (DNI). Gabbard’s ties to America’s adversaries, including Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, have raised serious questions about her loyalty. Making her the country’s DNI would almost certainly collapse ongoing U.S. participation in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance in which the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have shared intelligence since World War II.
As former Illinois representative Joe Walsh wrote: “Donald Trump just picked someone to oversee our intelligence who, herself, couldn’t pass a security clearance check. She couldn’t get security clearance. She couldn’t get a job in our intelligence community. Because she’s too compromised by Russia. Yet Trump picked her to run the whole thing.”
Trump appears eager to demonstrate his control of Republicans in the Senate by ramming through appointments that will collapse the rule of law at home (Gaetz) and the international rules-based order globally (Hegseth and Gabbard). When Texas senator John Cornyn said he would like to see the Gaetz report, Trump loyalist Steve Bannon said: “You either get with the program, brother, or you're going to finish third in your primary.” A member of Trump’s transition team said that Trump wants to bend Republican senators to his will “until they snap in half.”
Despite the fact the Republicans will hold a majority in the Senate when Trump takes office, Trump’s picks are so deeply flawed and dangerous that Trump and his team knew they would not get confirmed. So they demanded that Republicans in the Senate give up their constitutional power of advising the president on high-level appointments and consenting to his picks: the “advice and consent” requirement of the Constitution.
Trump demanded that the Senate recess in order for him to push through his choices as recess appointments. Even the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board came out against this scheme, calling it “anti-constitutional” and noting that it would “eliminate one of the basic checks on power that the Founders built into the American system of government.”
Now, in order to bring senators to heel, the Trump team is threatening to start its own super PAC to undermine the existing Senate Leadership Fund, whose leaders they insist are not loyal enough to Trump. A person close to Trump said that Senate Republican leaders “should reflect current leadership and the future, not the past.” “It doesn’t make sense,” one Republican operative told Politico’s Natalie Allison, Ally Mutnick, and Adam Wren. “Trump just had this massive win and now they are bringing in this Never Trumper.”
But for all the spin, the political calculation for Republican senators is not as clear as the Trump team is trying to project. At 78, Trump is not exactly the face of the party’s future. Nor did he deliver a “massive win.” He won less than 50% of the popular vote with many voters apparently unaware of his policies, and while the Republicans did retake the Senate majority, they did so with very little help—financial or otherwise—from him. Republicans will have as bad a map in the 2026 midterm elections as the Democrats had in 2024, and Trump’s voters tend to be loyal to him and no one else, generally not turning out in midterms.
It is also possible that, aside from political calculations, enough Senate Republicans take seriously their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” as well as the Senate’s role in the constitutional system of checks and balances that they will judge Trump’s antics with that in mind.
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Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/15/nx-s1-5192915/infrastructure-law-biden-no-political-benefit
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/12/trump-administration-transition/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25318699-hegseth-insider-threat-email
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/15/pete-hegseth-sexual-assault-investigation/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-meddling-may-snuff-out-gaetz-underage-sex-report/
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/15/trump-senate-elections-2026-fundraising-00189839
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/15/politics/security-clearances-fbi-gabbard-gaetz
X:
WalshFreedom/status/1857135902025490524
Bluesky:
What is the point of required background checks and security clearances if one can simply say, “nope I’m not submitting to that.” and they are permitted to carry on without clearance?? Whose fault is that? What is the point of the ethics paperwork required of incoming presidents if the system so readily crumples and allows an incoming president to receive classified info without the ethics paperwork? A big part of the problem seems to be rules and requirements that are not enforced!!
Thanks for giving us hope Professor. We need it now more than ever. I really, truly appreciate all of your dedication and hard work to preserve our democracy.