17 Jan
2017
Countdown to Inauguration, Another Raft of Confirmation Hearings and The Trump Doctrine: Sphere Consulting’s TenCount for January 16, 2017
- It’s Inauguration Week! Government offices are closed Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and much of the city is shut down on Friday for the Inauguration festivities for the 45th President, Donald J. Trump. In between are another half dozen confirmation hearings for Trump Cabinet appointees, and on Saturday the city will play host to the Women’s March on Washington and the National Prayer Service. In short, don’t try to drive in D.C. this week.
- The First 100 Days is a concept originated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a measure of what he had accomplished during the first session of Congress in 1933. It has since come to stand for the period at which a president’s influence is at its highest, when he will translate whatever mandate he believes he received from voters into concrete policy and legislation. Trump released such a plan in October, before the election, outlining 28 initiatives ranging from restrictions on lobbying to ending illegal immigration. “If we follow these steps,” he said at the time, “we will once more have a government of, by, and for the people.”
- Betsy DeVos, President-Elect Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Education, has many in the education community up in arms over her support for school choice. Public school advocates, many of them Democrats, believe the use of publicly funded vouchers to pay for private-school education undermines public education. Some school-choice advocates, meanwhile, many of them Republican, don’t want the federal government involved in what they believe should be local decisions. The issues will be hashed out Tuesday at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
- The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will meet on Tuesday to consider the nomination of Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana to be Interior Secretary. Zinke has been a fierce opponent of transfer of federal land to the states, but as an advocate for the Keystone pipeline is opposed by many conservation groups. During a 2014 debate, he said that climate change “is not a hoax, but it’s not proven science either.”
- Four Senate committees convene at 10 a.m. Wednesday to consider nominees to the Trump Cabinet. The Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will consider Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary, a hearing postponed from a week ago after the ethics office complained that it had not had time to consider all of the evidence related to Ross’s billions of dollars of investments. “The 1 percent is being picked on,” he once said, and although Ross opposes most trade deals, he once supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump has declared dead.
- Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt will be grilled by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee over his nomination to head the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency he has sued 14 times. Conservative groups support Pruitt, a leader of a movement that believes states know their needs best and should be left to regulate their own environment without federal interference.
- Also Wednesday, Dr. Tom Price, a Congressman from Georgia who has worked for six years to undo Obamacare, will face questions from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee on his nomination as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Unlike many critics of Obamacare, however, who offered little in the way of replacements for the health care plan, Price sponsored a comprehensive replacement plan, much of which is now part of Speaker Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda.
- Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who once named the Energy Department as one of three cabinet divisions that he would eliminate as president, faces a hearing to head that same department on Thursday before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee. Among his duties, the Energy Secretary oversees the nation’s nuclear-weapons labs and its program to safeguard the nuclear arsenal, making sure it is in working order. That job looms large following President-Elect Trump’s vow to “strengthen and expand” America’s nuclear capabilities.
- Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, also is slated for a Thursday hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. A former Goldman Sachs trader, Mnuchin has vowed to divest himself of more than 40 companies, investments and hedge funds but will retain his stake in an investment company named after himself. That is likely to draw the attention of committee members, who no doubt remember the intense criticism that Trump expressed about Wall Street during the campaign.
- Plenty of people are still wondering what a Trump presidency will mean, and there are three chances on Wednesday to figure it out. The Heritage Foundation will host former Speaker Newt Gingrich for the third of a six-part series on “Understanding Trump and Trumpism.” The Cato Institute debates “The Trump Doctrine,” focused on foreign and defense policy. And the Georgetown Law Center discusses “Congress, the Executive Branch and the Trump Administration.”