Matt Gaetz’s nomination for Trump Attorney General is in serious trouble already
Donald Trump probably could have snuck just about any low profile Attorney General pick through a recess appointment. Instead Trump picked Matt Gaetz, the center of ongoing controversy due to the underage sex trafficking allegations against him. Yesterday I wrote that this nomination had a decent chance of failing. Now there’s more reason to believe it just might fail.
The first clue that something was off was when Gaetz resigned from the House last night, just two days before the Republican-controlled House Ethics Committee was set to release a reportedly damaging report about him. Was this even a serious nomination, or was is merely cover to give Gaetz an excuse to resign without having to admit why he’s really resigning?
This morning Senate Democrats revealed that there are at least five to ten “no” votes for Gaetz among Republican Senators. The question was then whether these Republican Senators would go public and sink the nomination or whether they would quietly cave to Trump. But then Senator John Cornyn announced this afternoon that he wants the House Ethics Committee report about Gaetz to be released.
Given that Cornyn is influential within his party, this likely means that the House Ethics Committee will indeed either release the report or leak it to the media. Reporter Julie K. Brown says that the report could surface as soon as later today, and that the report is indeed as damaging for Gaetz as has been previously reported.
Why does this matter? The release of this report will ensure that Matt Gaetz’s scandals and alleged crimes will utterly dominate the headlines for the next week. It’ll make it very difficult for Republican Senators to go along with a recess appointment of Gaetz, and it’ll give them an easy excuse to announce that they’re opposed to the Gaetz nomination.
So what are the odds that the Gaetz nomination happens? I’m not even going to try to put a percentage on it. You can never trust the Republicans to do the right thing, but you can always trust them to do the self-interested thing. That said, it’s not clear what the self-interested thing is here. Senate Republicans clearly want to work with Trump to the extent that they can, but at least some of them are making it clear that they don’t want to stick their neck so far out that they get damaged by Gaetz’s hideous scandals.
There is also the theory that perhaps Trump nominated Gaetz for Attorney General simply to give him an excuse to resign from the House, without any expectation that Gaetz will end up with the job, and that this is just a smokescreen to give cover for Trump’s real Attorney General pick. This could be the case. But if so, it means Trump and his babysitters truly are political morons. A failed Attorney General nomination right out of the gate, particularly one this scandalous and embarrassing, would be a bodyblow for Trump’s presidency. This is how you lose political clout overnight. We’ll see.
