Public Notice on Trump’s swift move to demand the powers of a dictator:

But the process of staffing up every new administration has slowed to a crawl because Republicans spent the last 25 years weaponizing Senate procedure to obstruct Democrats. Democrats have certainly returned fire, but no one has done more to ratchet up the temperature — and the gridlock — than Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he crowed back in 2010. And one of the ways McConnell ensured that Obama couldn’t enact his agenda, despite having a majority in the House for his first two years and in the Senate for six, was to filibuster literally everything, including Obama’s executive branch nominations.

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It’s not difficult to see why Trump would like to avoid putting his preferred appointees through the wringer of confirmation, even after McConnell did him a solid and changed the rules in 2019 to cut debate time for lower-level nominees from 30 hours down to just two.

The last time around, Trump’s appointees took quite a beating from congressional Democrats, most notably Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who stammered through an interrogation by his former colleague, then-Sen. Kamala Harris. And Sessions was, on paper at least, a rational choice for the office. This time Trump is threatening to make shitposter Kash Patel head of the FBI. Even assuming Patel could get confirmed, Democrats would surely take advantage of confirmation hearings to draw attention to his promise to weaponize law enforcement to attack the media and embark on a revenge tour against everyone who ever tried to bring Trump to justice.

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In short, Trump is demanding, as the price of his support, that the incoming Senate majority leader promise to let him skip checks and balances and stack his administration with every unconfirmable ghoul he can find.

Naturally he’s got a whole cadre of Republican spinmeisters willing to dress up this naked extortion and gross assault on the separation of powers as a measured response to Democratic obstruction. Former White House Counsel Don McGahn took to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page on Monday to tut-tut that “recess appointments are a tradition worth restoring, and Mr. Trump deserves to have the power that all his predecessors had.” This ignores the reality that Biden’s confirmations also took forever, and no president has ever had the power to simply staff his entire administration without the bother of confirmation hearings.

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So now Trump is currently naming a cadre of offensively unqualified sycophants to staff every government agency, safe in the knowledge that his congressional allies will roll over and cede their constitutional authority to him and three Supreme Court justices will execute an about face and discover that recess appointments are very cool and very legal after all.

In short: no checks, no balances.