Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio barely contains his disdain for the Republican Party’s confirmation of a slew of President Donald Trump nominees that they knew were bumbling idiots.
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“Naively, lawmakers assumed that anyone nominated for a powerful position and confirmed by the Senate would necessarily have the competence and integrity to serve in another powerful position briefly, while a permanent appointee is chosen,” Catoggio complained. “That the president might nominate henchmen and that a compliant Senate might rubber-stamp them seems not to have occurred to them.”
It also didn’t seem to matter that people like law professor Jack Goldsmith warned in 2024 that Trump would “game the vacancy process” by arguing that any Senate-confirmed officer serving anywhere in the government can fill his or her position if the president desires, potentially for years.
“Confirming Bill Pulte — or Todd Blanche or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel — to any position effectively meant confirming them to every position, at least on a temporary basis,” spat Catoggio. “No matter: Every Senate Republican voted yes on Pulte’s nomination to the FHFA anyway.
Federal laws permits an acting director — no matter how bad — to remain in the job for up to 210 days, then for an additional 210 days if a nominee to replace him is rejected by the Senate, and then for another 210 days if a second nominee is rejected.
“In other words, Bill Pulte can lawfully hold the position of director of national intelligence for the rest of this year—and then for all of next year, provided that Trump is willing to nominate two unconfirmable putzes in succession to replace him,” Catoggio said, adding that the authors of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act didn’t anticipate an autocratic executive who so adores the word “acting” in front of a job title. This, said Catoggio, leaves the nation with an acting attorney general who seems “downright eager to commit impeachable offenses to show the boss how eager he is to stay on the job indefinitely and a new director of national intelligence who will doubtless behave the same way.”
“It’s a coincidence, I’m sure, that two positions with outsized potential for abuse in harassing the president’s critics are now held by two of the biggest Trump chuds in the government, neither of whom was approved by the Senate for their current jobs,” said Catoggio. “Just as it must be a coincidence that this is an election year and the White House clearly expects both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to play influential roles in preventing, ahem, fraud at the polls this fall. In Bill Pulte, the president now has a figure who’ll wield that influence enthusiastically.”
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This is Trump’s “middle finger” to a “Duma-fied Republican” Senate that is beginning to “resist his most loathsome impulses,” Catoggio said. “ … If the Senate GOP won’t make him happy, he’ll make himself happy by filling a key vacancy with a putrid loyalist appointment whom he surely knows they disdain.”
The GOP could amend the FVRA to prevent dirty appointments, provided they can find 20 Senate Republican votes “to override the inevitable Trump veto” But don’t get your hopes up, said Catoggio.
“The caucus of disgruntled GOP lame ducks, while big and growing, ain’t that big,” said Catoggio. “If there were 20 civic-minded conservatives in the chamber, the president would have been convicted and disqualified from holding future office five years ago.”
Catoggio also doubted the Senate GOP “has the stomach” to muster just four Republicans to join Democrats to roadblock Trump’s nominations and stall conservative judicial nominees and leave their fate to a Democratic Senate next year.
“Pulte will likely serve for as long as the president wants him to serve, and not a day less,” said Catoggio.
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