Andy McCarthy Tears Trump’s ‘Unconstitutional Recess-Appointment Scheme’ Apart: ‘An Attack on Liberty’ and ‘All of Us’
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
Fox News contributor and National Review contributing editor Andy McCarthy put President-elect Donald Trump’s “unconstitutional recess-appointment scheme” on blast in a column for the latter on Monday, characterizing it as “an attack on liberty” and “all of us.”
“President-elect Donald Trump continues to stamp his detractors as prescient in their insistence that, left to his own devices, he will ride roughshod over the Constitution,” began McCarthy before turning his attention to “the outrageous recess-appointment scheme by which, informed hypothesis holds, the once and future president will try to install any unconfirmable nominees, such as Matt Gaetz, the prospective attorney general, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nanny-state anti-vaccine crank nominated to be Health and Human Services Secretary.”
“The Framers were concerned that the presidency they were creating could become tyrannical. The road to tyranny — meaning, to the eradication of Americans’ liberty — would always be the accumulation of too much power in any one government actor’s hands. Hence, they divided power, structuring the government so that the branches checked each other’s authority,” wrote the legal expert. “In that vein, they empowered the Senate to ensure that high executive officials had the qualifications and character fitting for public trust — the government offices in which they would wield enormous power. The president can fire any executive official at any time — subordinates are delegated to exercise the president’s power only at the president’s pleasure. But the president cannot hire anyone he wants. Nominees are subject to the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent (Article II, Section 2).”
“For a president to undermine the Senate’s key constitutional role in vetting appointees is not an attack on the Senate; it is an attack on liberty, on all of us,” he argued.
In a column last week, McCarthy also took issue with Trump’s nomination of Gaetz to serve as the country’s top cop, submitting that “Gaetz was among the leading proponents of the effort to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election,” and “No one who took such a position is qualified to be attorney general of the United States — the federal government’s chief law-enforcement official (other than the president) among whose most important jobs is to defend the Constitution. Case closed.”
