The Biden Cabinet and Administration

There are reasons to have a civilian SecDef. Not a fan of this move.

 

It makes sense to me! Defense = military does it not? Guarantee he has a shit-ton of boots-on-the-ground military/defense experience. Besides he's retired thus not active duty anymore. He's technically not a military member.

 

Retired General. He is a civilian.

 

Not long enough. He'll still need a congressional waiver.

 

Yeah, two waivers in four years is two too many.

 

Point of order: In his memoirs, Sherman talks about agreeing to be Secretary of War for Grant because during the Civil War, both he and Grant recognized that if the US was to have a capable military, they needed to enact certain changes. (One of these was how the chain of command was structured, but others related to lessons learned during the Civil War.) Sherman described how he had to fight like hell just to get some of the things put in place that folks take for granted today. (For example, the practice of the time was not to replenish existing units with new soldiers, but to instead create new units staffed with raw recruits and, maybe, a few experienced officers.) A civilian Secretary of War would have been unlikely to understand things the way someone fresh off the battlefield, like Sherman, would have.

We do not know the damage that Trump has done to the government. We only have some idea of the things that we've done, and having a Secretary of Defense who not only knows military life but was also there while Trump was screwing things up might be better able to deal with things than a civilian would.

 

Austin retired in April 2016.

 

yeah I mentioned that - the difference has escaped quite a few people.

 

I agree with you! Let's not make a habit out of it though.

 

No, they came to a different conclusion than you did. The difference seems to have escaped you.

 

I thought it said that he retired in 2018. Regardless, with things the way they are now, I'd prefer Biden tapped someone with recent experience in the military or connected to the Secretary of Defense pre-Trump, as they'll have a good handle on things.

 

Yeah, there's nothing disingenuous about his race baiting!

(J/K but could not resist the low-hanging fruit.)

 

No that didn't escape me. But yes indeed some did come to a different conclusion. IMHO the position of SED should be SME in the defense of our great nation. Who better than somebody who has already been in very similar position at the top of his game?

 

Any other year I'd agree with the idea that we shouldn't violate the civil leadership norms.

This is a year where we've seen top leadership gutted and replaced by political toadies, a president is actively and openly calling our election a hoax, and we've seen people in the military repeatedly called to task and even fired for opposing said POTUS, like Vindman and the captain of the carrier who sent out a plea for help over covid. And in the not so recent past we saw attempts to get rid of the block on white supremacists in the military.

Yeah, I'm more than fine with someone who has personal relationships and is well regarded in the military establishment.

There's work to do, now, and the less lead up time, the better.

 

NBC is reporting Doug Jones is the frontrunner for AG

 

Captain Saru, or that DINO loser from the deep south?

 

Either would probably be better than the last AG from Alabama, Jeff Sessions...

Apropos of nothing, I would watch a series about a bad-ass renegade black woman deputy AG who does whatever the fuck she wants to the dismay of the social injustice warrior crowd, as AG Doug Jones stands impotently by.

 

Doug Jones has some experience getting white supremacist domestic terrorists off the streets, and I have a feeling that's going to be a valuable skill for the next few years ...

 

Agreed. I saw the President of the NAACP tonight complaining that he really doesn't know what Jones is about when it comes to race relations. I'm not sure where he's been. Interesting factoid: Former Alabama AG Bill Baxley once responded to a death threat from the KKK by sending them a nice, short letter on official state letterhead: "Kiss my ass."

 

I said it was going to be a disaster when Sessions left the Senate to take over at Justice. I'm of the opposite mind when it comes to Doug Jones. I'd love to see it.

Regardless of what you think about his politics, and we do have some major disagreements, Doug Jones is honest, competent, and fair. We can use a lot of that right now.

 

And Axios reports that Pete Buttegieg may get the Ambassadorship to China. Hmmmm....

https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigie...=social&utm_campaign=organic&utm_content=1100

 

And with that, there is the possibility of more resistance from Democrats to a proposed Biden move before he's in office than there probably has been from Republicans against Trump's moves for almost the entirety of his presidency.

 

And in your opinion is this resistance to cabinet picks a detriment or an asset to a functioning Biden government?

 

this is a bad sign. My big worry is that Biden hasn't learned the lessons he'll need to maximize the opportunities he has before him.

https://prospect.org/cabinet-watch/...eKY1V5QJgIp50ynDWP4Z05J6_Bqos2BKW2PUc0Fxh6H9M

Four years of Donald Trump has offered an extreme version of Washington policymaking as a slipshod, ad hoc lunge from one decision to the next. That’s more the norm than people maybe assume. There’s less of a grand design to modern politics and more of a series of haphazard events; this is why governing has struggled so mightily of late, in fact. The case of Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), President-elect Joe Biden’s apparent choice to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is a signature example.

Fudge didn’t want the HUD job, a fact revealed by someone close to the process—Marcia Fudge. She was openly campaigning to run the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as recently as a few days ago, and scornful of the idea that she could be pigeonholed as an inner-city Black Democrat. “As this country becomes more and more diverse, we're going to have to stop looking at only certain agencies as those that people like me fit in,” she told Politico last month. “You know, it's always ‘we want to put the Black person in Labor or HUD.’”

Marcia Fudge is now in HUD.
---
Fudge was intending to rethink the notion of how Black voices can be heard on policy. She set her sights on USDA, an agency whose primary function in terms of dollar amounts is actually to distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, sometimes called food stamps. She has been on the Agriculture Committee in Congress since entering Congress in 2008, and now chairs the Nutrition Subcommittee, the key oversight entity for SNAP distribution.


Fudge had powerful backers. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), single-handedly responsible for rescuing Biden’s presidential hopes in South Carolina, wanted Fudge at USDA, along with the Congressional Black Caucus. The choice came down to her, or former North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a top rural adviser to Biden during the campaign. (We know how Biden did in rural America, right?)

Impressions are being given that HUD and Interior are not important federal agencies but political chits to be handed out.

Heitkamp represented the corporate Ag establishment, a stalking horse for the big seed and meat processing and dairy conglomerates that have been mowing down family farmers for decades. When coastal liberals say that rural Americans vote against their own interests, they’re mistaken, because those interests are assuredly not being met by Big Ag and its backers. It’s led to hollowed-out communities, families giving up livelihoods that have lasted generations, and significant despair. That’s what the fight was about: Big Ag versus a new way forward.


Biden chose Big Ag.

It may look like a punt, because neither Fudge nor Heitkamp got the job. But the so-called “compromise” choice was Tom Vilsack, Ag Secretary under Obama for both terms. However, he is fully aligned with Heitkamp’s corporate Ag, export-driven strategy. Vilsack spent the past four years as a dairy industry lobbyist with a trade group called the U.S. Dairy Export Council; almost no other agricultural sector has grown more concentrated in that time, led by Dairy Farmers of America, a for-profit cooperative being sued by its own farmers for colluding to hold down milk prices.

I’ve talked to a lot of family farmers over the past few years, for my book and other reporting. Vilsack’s name is a four-letter word to them. At USDA, Vilsack promised to tour farm country and listen to family farm stories of monopolist abuse and intimidation. He listened and went back to Washington and did nothing but approve more mergers. Rules designed to ban Big Ag retaliation against small farmers and give them stronger legal tools to prevent abuse languished on Vilsack’s desk until the very end of his term, and when they were finally proposed, it was too late to finalize them. Trump’s USDA promptly rolled back the rules and dissolved the agency that would have enforced them.

“Vilsack already had his shot to ruin rural America,” said one Democratic farm activist who requested anonymity because of the need to work with the future administration. “People don’t understand how angry farmers are in Wisconsin at Obama and him for failing the dairy crisis.”