The Soothing Calmness of Biden’s Cabinet
By: Carolyn Bertolino
Tags: National Security, Election 2020, News, Politics

Our country is collectively descompressing.

Photo by Suzy Brooks on Unsplash

Ahhh… how relaxing it is to watch the evening news show President-Elect Joe Biden’s first round of cabinet secretary choices. So nice to see people with experience in the agencies as well as career backgrounds in public service. The country is already calming down. I can’t be the only one who’s noticed the lack of notable organized violence after the election, in a huge contrast to the past few months. One might even observe that when the candidate with the most votes actually wins, things feel more peaceful.

It’s such a relief after Trump’s tumultuous one and only term, which the administration kicked off by naming a veritable “swamp” of industry insiders to all the agency posts after promising to do the opposite. For example Stephen Mnuchin, secretary of the treasury department that would oversee the mortgage companies he made his fortune from. Or, as in the case of education secretary Betsy Devos, absolutely no connection whatsoever except for having donated millions to the Republican party. Remember when we were grateful for the tiny morsel of having a person as normal and experienced as James Mattis for Secretary of Defense?

With the incoming Biden administration comes a newly created position in the National Security Council: Climate Czar. It’ll be filled by war-hero, former senator, and former secretary of state John Kerry.

As we appreciate and enjoy the fact that our new federal government actually views the climate emergency as something to take care of, it’s easy to remember trying desperately to think about how to save the planet by planting trees. It was alarming to watch the National Park Service be forced to set up an “alt” Facebook account due to censorship by the Trump administration and its first secretary of interior Ryan Zinke, who had a career background in things like oil pipelines. A memo was sent out which required park employees to notify supervisors in the administration before communicating with other agencies. The various proposals about which staff were restricted from commenting could include permission for oil and gas companies to drill on public lands bordering our parks.

Biden seems to be making good cabinet decisions with both policy and politics. It’ll be hard for senate Republicans to argue against the non-controversial nominees he introduced this week. He’s also being keeping in mind the increasingly influential left wing of the Democratic party by making choices that please everyone in the left from Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager to the director of the group Justice Democrats to Senator Elizabeth Warren.

What better choice for chief of staff could there be than the guy who oversaw the deflection of Ebola from our shores, Ron Klein? And how could anyone claim Linda Thomas-Greenfield, former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and form US ambassador to Liberia doesn’t have sufficient experience to handle the post of ambassador to the United Nations?

In Janet Yellen for treasury secretary, we get the progressive endorsement of Robert Reich, as well as a proven track record at the fed. Even Wall Street seems to approve. From the other end of the political spectrum, Gary Cohen, one of Trump’s economic advisors plucked from Goldman Sachs, commented that she is an excellent choice to oversee the treasury department.

It would be stupid to assume the Republicans in the senate are going to honestly evaluate the nominees and screen them out based on the usual things such as weeding out conflicts of interest and making sure they know their craft. Even so, the quality and appropriateness of everyone so far is sure to make it hard for them to find anything the public can actually see as bad about them. Also, 22 senate Republicans, some in swing states, will be competing to save their seats next election. That’s compared to the 12 that Democrats will have to defend.

Considering the current political climate, I can’t see appointee obstruction working extremely well for the Republicans this time. Americans are tired of drama in the federal government. Government officials as well as the general public have grown weary of Trump and his family. They also seem to be showing signs of disillusionment with industry beneficiaries in positions of authority over the industry in which they made their fortunes. They realize the “swamp” Trump claimed to be draining four years ago had not even been created yet. And now that it’s been created, they’re anxious to be rid of it.

Americans are sick of Friday Night Massacres, immediate family members doubling as advisors, firings by tweet, “alternative facts”, ambassadorships left unstaffed, and “acting” secretaries who would have be confirmed if they just didn’t have such obvious conflicts of interests. The electorate is tired of having to worry about what next “first” will happen in the way of unconstitutional power grabs. The country is sick of worrying that the tax-payer funded justice department is being used for the president’s defense in his personal lawsuits. People are sick of having a president who’s been sued thousands of times and is under investigation for tax fraud and financial crimes.

The experiment of having a bankrupt reality tv star as president is over. Democracy survived a failed coup, and the hypothesis that our country can be successfully run by a businessman looking out for his own profits turned out to be not only unworkable but unpopular as well. People are ready to get back to having a president with no emoluments and a cabinet full of boring bureaucrats with successful experience as public servants.