Matt Gaetz: Yes Man

When I was Mayor of Madison I wanted to have cabinet government, just like the governor has at the state level. My argument was that a chief executive at any level deserved to have his own team in place to implement the policies he was elected to pursue. Instead, the city operated like most cities in Wisconsin, except for Milwaukee, with managers hired on five-year contracts that could hold over, instead of being directly appointed by a new mayor.

Over time I softened on that position. I found almost all city managers to be competent professionals. I didn’t encounter a lot of resistance to do what I thought needed doing and when I did get push back it was over the practicality or advisability of my chosen course — and they were usually right.

So, over those eight years I learned some lessons, and my thinking evolved, over this whole idea of the relationship between elected officials and the permanent bureaucracy.

Donald Trump takes the view that there is this “deep state,” dominated by liberal ideologues, who are buried in the Washington establishment and intent on resisting or subverting his every move. And at the federal level there probably is some cause for concern, though I think the deep state thing flirts with paranoia. (Ok, it may have gone on a second date with paranoia.) But even John Kennedy lamented, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, that his orders to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey had not been carried out and were then giving Khrushchev leverage to place his own missiles 90 miles from our shores.

So, I do think that Presidents have a right to expect that any resistance to their initiatives should come from the Congress and perhaps the Supreme Court and from state and local governments. Aside from the Court, which has its own legitimacy, those are other elected officials pushing back against the nation’s top elected official. It’s not the place of unelected bureaucrats to subvert the policies of the elected representatives of the people.

But it’s also not as cut and dried as I just stated it. That’s especially true when it comes to the Attorney General or, in my case, the City Attorney. I had a great City Attorney in the late Mike May and he also became a personal friend. But he never hesitated to tell me when I couldn’t do something that I wanted to do. He didn’t see me as his client and he didn’t see his job as justifying anything I wanted to do, regardless of my actual authority to do it. Rather, he saw his client as the City of Madison and his job was to make sure that officials were faithfully executing the city’s ordinances and, where they applied, the state and federal laws. It was also his job to keep us out of court or, when that was unavoidable, to put the city in the best possible position to prevail.

And that’s the way Presidents should look at Attorneys General. It’s fine to have someone in that position who is well known to the President and maybe even a friend. Kennedy even installed his brother — which was justifiably quite controversial at the time. But what they should expect is that their AG will give them good counsel about what they can and cannot do under the Constitution. The AG’s client is that Constitution, not the person in the Oval Office.

Which brings us to Matt Gaetz. It’s clear that Trump’s intent is to have a yes man as his AG. He has been outspoken about his intent to use the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents and he sees Gaetz as a man who would never tell him he can’t.

In addition, Gaetz is wholly unqualified for the job. He practiced law only briefly before running for office. He has no prosecutorial experience. He’s never been a judge. Like most of Trump’s nominees, he has no qualifications for his post. In some cases, that’s not all that important or unusual, but in this case it’s deadly.

Much has been made about the allegations that Gaetz paid a 17-year old for sex. That’s bad, but what if it turned out not to be true? Gaetz would still be unqualified, both by experience and temperament, for a role this important and sensitive.

My guess is that Senate Republicans will do what they always have done with regard to Trump. After initially signaling that they know what the right thing to do is, they’ll cave to him and the online mob that he can rile up. And another check on Trump’s authoritarianism will fall.

At that point, I really will hope that there is a deep state in the DOJ, a cadre of lawyers who know their client is the Constitution and not one vindictive man.