By Geller Report | Created at 2024-11-16 14:16:35 | Updated at 2024-11-16 16:38:30
2 hours ago
Not only are Democrats denying the results of the 2024 election (which they jailed Americans for in the wake of the 2020 steal) but they are publicly plotting to form a “shadow government” to defy and undermine President Trump’s authority.
A Democratic ‘Shadow Cabinet’ Lacks for Logic in the American Republic
The day George Washington muttered that he would never again go to Congress for advice.
‘Signing of the Constitution,’ detail, by Howard Chandler Christy, 1940. Via Wikimedia Commons
By: Dean Karayanis, NY Sun, Nov. 15, 2024:
Congressman Wiley Nickel, Democrat of North Carolina, is urging his party to “appoint a shadow cabinet to fight back against the worst excesses of a second Trump administration.” He’s borrowing the idea from the Britain’s parliamentary system, but it would be a poor fit for our republic, eroding the will of the people which invests executive power in only one president at a time.
“Across the Atlantic,” Mr. Nickel wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Monday, “the British have something we don’t: a team from the opposition that mirrors the government’s cabinet members. They watch the cabinet closely, publicly challenging, scrutinizing, and offering new ideas.” That these ideas were rejected in the election escapes mention.
A prime minister isn’t chosen in a nationwide vote, and parliamentary systems have multiple parties rather than America’s two. The U.K. prime ministers sometimes form governments — including a cabinet — in coalition with smaller parties and serve only so long as they have support. In 2022, Prime Minister Truss stepped down after just fifty days. It was the shortest tenure in British history.
The American system is different by design. Presidents are elected to four-year terms, exercising co-equal power with the legislative and judicial branches. Their cabinets, while not laid out in the Constitution, perform a function it authorizes while a shadow cabinet would be created out of whole cloth to undermine the president, who is the sole individual vested with the executive power.
To ensure the nation spoke with a unified voice abroad, the Constitutional Convention empowered the Senate to offer “advice and consent” on foreign policy and appointments but didn’t lay out a mechanism for doing so. The job of putting this concept into action, as with so many things, fell to President Washington.
On August 22, 1789, four months after taking the oath of office, Washington met with senators in person, asking for their input on treaties with the Creek and Cherokee nations. The author of “The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution,” Lindsay Chervinsky, laid out the difficulty that led the first president to create the cabinet.
Washington, seeking the Senate’s input, “carefully crafted” a statement of his aims in his proposed negotiations. When his vice president, John Adams, read it to the senators, Ms. Chervinsky writes that he was met with “awkward silence.” Senator William Maclay recorded that “his colleagues were so intimidated by” the great general “that they cowered in shameful silence.”
Maclay suggested that committees break off to discuss Washington’s remarks. The president, feeling he’d wasted his time, “lost his temper, stood up, and shouted, ‘This defeats every purpose of my coming here!’” Heading to his carriage, he “muttered under his breath that he would never return for advice.” He did go back two days later, having promised to do so, but never again.
All American presidents since have followed this precedent in letting their cabinet secretaries — based on Washington’s counsels of war during the Revolution — fulfill the Senate’s role. The first cabinet had four secretaries: State, Treasury, War, and Attorney General. The number has since grown to fifteen.
Cabinet secretaries are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The shadow body Mr. Nickel proposes wouldn’t face such scrutiny. Its members would be partisan appointees tasked with siphoning off the power the president has earned. Much like Democrats giving Speaker Pelosi the title of “speaker emerita” in 2022, a shadow cabinet would claim an unearned mandate.
In Ms. Pelosi’s case, her invented title doesn’t just infringe on the power of Speaker Johnson, chosen to lead by the House majority. It also undermines her own party’s minority leader, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. His predecessor remaining in office even after losing the majority makes it difficult for him to chart a new direction for the Democratic caucus as he is no longer its sole voice.
“We can’t let,” Mr. Nickel wrote, “Donald Trump’s radical agenda go unanswered or unopposed.” Of course, no losing party is expected to end their opposition or silence their voices. The American people, though, saw Trump’s plans and judged them preferable to the Democratic alternative. The existing mechanisms for resisting them work just as well now as they have since Washington’s day.
The Truth Must be Told
Your contribution supports independent journalism
Please take a moment to consider this. Now, more than ever, people are reading Geller Report for news they won't get anywhere else. But advertising revenues have all but disappeared. Google Adsense is the online advertising monopoly and they have banned us. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have blocked and shadow-banned our accounts. But we won't put up a paywall. Because never has the free world needed independent journalism more.
Everyone who reads our reporting knows the Geller Report covers the news the media won't. We cannot do our ground-breaking report without your support. We must continue to report on the global jihad and the left's war on freedom. Our readers’ contributions make that possible.
Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too.
Please contribute here.
or
Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently
banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds.
They are disappearing us. But we are here.
Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here— it’s free and it’s essential NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America's survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.
Follow Pamela Geller on Gettr. I am there. click here.
Follow Pamela Geller on Trump's social media platform, Truth Social. It's open and free.Remember, YOU make the work possible. If you can, please contribute to Geller Report.
Join The Conversation. Leave a Comment.
We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spammy or unhelpful, click the - symbol under the comment to let us know. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.
If you would like to join the conversation, but don't have an account, you can sign up for one right here.
If you are having problems leaving a comment, it's likely because you are using an ad blocker, something that break ads, of course, but also breaks the comments section of our site. If you are using an ad blocker, and would like to share your thoughts, please disable your ad blocker. We look forward to seeing your comments below.
