NATION/WORLD
Thursday, December 1, 2016
East Oregonian
Page 7A
Trump’s Cabinet: ‘Draining the swamp’ or diving right in?
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Donald
Trump promised to “drain the
swamp” in the nation’s capital.
Instead, he’s diving right in.
So far, the president-elect is
tapping people with deep ties to
Washington and Wall Street as he
fills out his Cabinet, turning to two
power centers he vilified as greedy,
corrupt and out of touch with
Americans during his White House
campaign. His choices have won
praise from Republicans relieved
by his more conventional choices,
but could risk angering voters who
rallied behind his calls for upending
the political system.
Two of Trump’s early picks
are wealthy financial industry
insiders with ties to the kinds of
institutions he railed against as a
candidate. Elaine Chao, his choice
for transportation secretary and an
accomplished political figure in
her own right, is married to Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
— blending family and political
power in a way Trump fiercely
criticized campaign rival Hillary
Clinton for. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s
selection for attorney general, has
spent two decades in the Senate, and
Tom Price, his health and human
services nominee, is a six-term
congressman.
The gap between Trump’s
campaign rhetoric and his governing
decisions is most striking regarding
his emerging economic team. On
Wednesday, he announced that
he planned to nominate former
Goldman Sachs executive Steven
Mnuchin as his Treasury secretary
and billionaire investor Wilbur Ross
to lead the Commerce Department.
As a candidate, Trump said Wall
Street had created “tremendous
problems” for the country. He
included the CEO of Goldman
Sachs in a television advertisement
that accused global financial powers
of having “robbed our working
class.”
Mnuchin and Ross also have
financial links to Trump’s White
House bid, with Mnuchin having led
the campaign’s fundraising efforts.
Trump repeatedly bragged that his
personal wealth — he mostly self-
funded his campaign during the
primaries — meant he would not
be beholden to donors who might
expect their financial contributions
to be repaid with powerful jobs or
insider access.
“I can’t be bought,” Trump said
during the campaign. “I won’t owe
anybody anything.”
Trump’s transition team brushed
aside questions about whether there
are inconsistencies between the
president-elect’s campaign rhetoric
and his Cabinet picks.
“These are experts who know
how to win,” spokesman Jason
Miller said Wednesday.
By picking billionaires, as well
as a smattering of millionaires, for
his Cabinet, Trump is asking voters
to trust that privileged insiders can
help a stressed and dispirited middle
class — even though he, like past
presidential candidates, promised
he would change that dynamic.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
In this Nov. 20 file photo, President-elect Donald Trump, left, stands
with investor Wilbur Ross after meeting at the Trump National Golf
Club Bedminster clubhouse in Bedminster, N.J.
Few of his choices have outwardly
displayed much of a common
touch. Many live surrounded by a
level of wealth that most Americans
struggle to fathom — and prospered
in recent decades as many Ameri-
cans coped with stagnant incomes.
Not only did Mnuchin once
work at Goldman Sachs, but so did
his father.
After leaving the investment
bank in 2002, the Yale graduate
pivoted into hedge fund manage-
ment and producing blockbuster
movies such as “Batman vs
Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
Mnuchin invested in the wreckage
of the housing crisis, scooping up
the troubled bank IndyMac and
House Democrats re-elect Pelosi
as leader despite discontent
WASHINGTON (AP) —
House Democrats re-elected
Nancy Pelosi as their leader
Wednesday, ratifying the status
quo in a changing Washington
despite widespread frustration
over the party’s direction.
That disenchantment mani-
fested itself in 63 lawmakers
supporting Pelosi’s opponent,
Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, in the Pelosi
secret-ballot vote. That was by
far the largest defection Pelosi has suffered
since she began leading House Democrats
in 2002.
Still, the California lawmaker had
declared ahead of time that more than
two-thirds of the caucus was supporting her,
and she won almost exactly two-thirds with
134 votes. It was a testament to her vote-
counting skills and to her ability to hang
onto power even in dark days for Demo-
crats, as they confront a capital that will be
fully controlled by the GOP next year.
“I have a special spring in my step today
because this opportunity is a special one, to
lead the House Democrats, bring everyone
together as we go forward,” Pelosi said after
the vote, appearing elated in her victory.
She disputed the suggestion that she
might be concerned about the defections
she suffered. “They weren’t defections, I
had two-thirds of the vote,” Pelosi said,
repeating “two-thirds, two-thirds” to a
group of assembled reporters.
And she insisted Democrats would
rebound. “We know how to win elections.
We’ve done it in the past, we will do it
again.”
Supporters said the 76-year-old Pelosi
was their best bet to confront a President
Donald Trump from the minority after
Democrats picked up only a half-dozen
seats in the House, far fewer than antici-
pated and well below Pelosi’s predictions.
Republicans are on track to hold at least
240 seats in the House next year, while
Democrats will have 194.
For their part, Ryan and his backers
insisted that they had won a victory in
sending a message to Pelosi about the
significant desire for change among House
Democrats.
“Somebody had to do something,” said
Ryan, a seven-term lawmaker
who before now had been largely
a back-bencher. “Our prospects
have improved just because of
this conversation.”
Yet Democrats’ marginalized
status was evident as Ryan strug-
gled to answer a question about
who would lead the party forward,
before concluding: “We’re all
going to participate in leading the
party.”
Leadership elections were originally
scheduled to be held before Thanksgiving
but were delayed to give Democrats more
time to consider a path forward. Lawmakers
expressed frustration over a range of issues,
including stagnant leadership in their
caucus, and Democrats’ failures to connect
with white working class voters.
“I’m very concerned we just signed
the Democratic party’s death certificate
... unless we change what we are talking
about, which is really the working man and
woman’s agenda,” said Rep. Kurt Schrader
of Oregon.
Pelosi has earned respect and loyalty from
many Democrats over the years, including
as a powerhouse fundraiser, raising over
$140 million for Democrats in the 2016
cycle, and as a skilled legislative tactician.
As speaker in 2009 she steered Obama’s
health care law through the House and also
pushed through a divisive bill to cap carbon
emissions, but Democrats suffered massive
losses in midterm elections the next year
and lost their majority.
Pelosi’s victory Wednesday came
only after she promised some changes to
assuage concerns in her caucus, including
adding a member of the freshmen class to
her leadership team and creating a handful
of other titled positions. But her proposals
do little to ensure new blood at the very
top or change the seniority system that has
key committees led by lawmakers in their
80s at a moment when the party needs to
be defending the health care law and other
initiatives dear to Democrats.
Some House Democrats did not hide
their disappointment at the outcome.
“It is obvious the current strategy
doesn’t work,” said Rep. Kyrsten Sinema
of Arizona.
turning a $1.6 billion profit in under
a year as millions of Americans
endured foreclosure.
Ross orbits a similar world
as Trump, as both of them have
luxurious homes in Manhattan
and Palm Beach, Florida. The
billionaire investor bought up many
struggling steel, auto and coal firms
in the industrial Midwest at a steep
discount and sold them for steep
profits, even as factory and mining
jobs at the core of American identity
disappeared.
Chao is the offspring of a
Chinese shipping magnate, in
addition to serving on the boards
of Wells Fargo bank, Dole Food
and News Corp., the parent of Fox
News. Education Secretary Betsy
DeVos, the wealthiest of Trump’s
Cabinet nominees thus far, married
into the family that started the sales
company Amway.
Trump and other Republicans
spent months warning voters that
a possible Clinton administration
would be lined with Wall Street
insiders, campaign donors and
other special interest hires. But
GOP officials have raised no such
concerns about Trump’s picks.
If anything, some Republicans
appear relieved. Many of Trump’s
picks are cut from a more tradi-
tional Republican mold and share
the party’s ideological preferences,
in some cases more so than Trump
himself.
“The picks so far have been
fantastic and well-received by
Republicans and conservatives of
all stripes,” said Cesar Conda, the
former chief of staff for Florida Sen.
Marco Rubio. “Trump is unifying
the party, which is essential to
getting his agenda enacted.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan, a
lukewarm Trump supporter for
much of the campaign, praised the
economic picks Wednesday, saying
he was “excited to get to work with
this strong team.”
Trump is still weighing his
choices for several Cabinet posts,
including secretary of state. Among
the leading contenders: millionaire
businessman Mitt Romney, the
2012 GOP presidential nominee,
and millionaire lawyer Rudy
Giuliani, the former New York City
mayor.
Conflict rules hardly the
same for president, others
WASHINGTON
(AP)
— Rep. David McKinley
has sold his West Virginia
engineering and architecture
firm, but it still bears his
name — and that earned the
Republican
congressman
a rebuke from the House
Ethics Committee.
President-elect Donald
Trump has built an interna-
tional property management,
real estate and branding busi-
ness around his name. There
appears to be no consequence
for that.
When it comes to
ethics, not all government
employees and elected offi-
cials are regulated equally.
What’s a serious matter for
a second-term congressman
with a small business has
no equivalent for a president
with a multibillion-dollar
empire.
The government’s legisla-
tive and judicial branches are
governed by well-established
rules, but there’s far less
clarity about what a president
can and cannot do. Conflict of
interest provisions are gener-
ally looser, though Democrat
Jimmy Carter, Republican
George W. Bush and many
other recent presidents took
care to separate themselves
from their businesses.
Trump
tweeted
Wednesday that he would
soon announce his plans to
step back from his company
while he is president. He
wrote that “legal documents
are being crafted which take
me completely out of busi-
ness operations.”
Many serious questions
remain: Will he retain an
ownership stake? Will, as
top aide Kellyanne Conway
suggested, his adult children
own and run the business? If
they do take over the Trump
Organization, will they
continue to be involved in
Trump’s administration, as
they have been?
Spokesmen for Trump’s
transition and the Trump
Organization
have
not
provided details.
While Trump develops
his plan, ethics lawyers and
good-government groups are
reviewing laws, past cases
and best practices — as well
as issues of who would even
have the standing to call out a
president for possible conflict
of interest violations.
As Danielle Brian, exec-
utive director of the Project
on Government Oversight,
put it, “We’re researching
things that hadn’t even been
considered before.”
“We have never had a
president with these enor-
mous business conflicts
domestically and globally,”
said Norman Eisen, who
served as President Barack
Obama’s first White House
ethics czar. “What’s more,
we’ve never had a president
AP Photo/ Evan Vucci, File
In this Nov. 9 file photo, President-elect Donald Trump
speaks in New York.
who seems to insist on
breaking the precedent set
by every previous president
for at least four decades of
doing a true blind trust or its
equivalent.”
Eisen and Richard Painter,
who held an equivalent posi-
tion under Bush, wrote in a
joint statement Wednesday
that it’s not enough for
Trump to simply step away
from company operations.
“Without an ethics fire-
wall that is set up at once and
continues into the admin-
istration, scandal is sure to
follow,” they wrote.
Self-policing has been
common in recent presiden-
cies, as well as in the legis-
lative and judicial branches.
Congress’ adherence to
ethics rules stems from its
ability to regulate itself. That
was the case with McKinley,
who violated a provision that
a fiduciary business such as
an architecture firm is barred
from using the name of a
government employee such
as a congressman.
Lawmakers “are attuned
to views of the voters
and perception of undue
conflicts,” said Andrew
Herman, a Washington
attorney who specializes in
congressional ethics. “That’s
why they’ve tended to have
stringent ethics rules and
committees to enforce them.”
Trump
has
broadly
asserted that he is not
hemmed in by conflict of
interest laws. “The law is
totally on my side,” Trump
told The New York Times
last week.
Herman
and
other
attorneys say that while the
president and vice president
are exempt from the federal
conflict of interest statute,
the country’s founders drew
a bright line at accepting
foreign gifts.
That ban is captured in
an antique-sounding part of
the Constitution called the
emoluments clause.
It could pose a problem
for Trump because he does
business all over the world.
Even his domestic opera-
tions, such as his new hotel in
Washington, could trip him.
Arthur Hellman, an
ethicist at the University of
Pittsburgh, said he does not
believe any U.S. court, much
less the Supreme Court,
has ever interpreted the
emoluments clause. “There
is nothing that sheds much
light on questions raised
by foreign officials giving
something or engaging
in activities that could be
construed as emoluments to
Trump or his businesses.”
However, a violation
might be difficult to chal-
lenge in court, Hellman said.
“It’s hard to imagine anyone
would have standing,” he
said. Other legal experts have
said that perhaps a business
competitor would have the
right to litigate.
At Democrats’ request,
the Congressional Research
Service recently put out
brief guidance on what rules
“might technically” apply to
the president.
Among them is the emol-
uments clause, a prohibition
on employing relatives, and
bribery provisions.
Another sticky issue:
Trump’s conflicts haven’t
been fully illuminated.
As a candidate, he filed
financial disclosures as
required by federal law,
including assets of more than
$1.4 billion and debt of at
least $265 million. He has
separately boasted that his
net worth is $10 billion
But unlike all recent major
party presidential candidates,
he did not make public his
tax returns, shielding from
view the full scope of his
business entanglements.
It’s also uncertain whether
Trump will file a new disclo-
sure of his wealth within
the first year after he takes
office in January, as previous
presidents have done, or wait
until required by law, in is
May 2018.
Such quandaries thrust
Congress into an important
watchdog role.
Few Republicans have
raised red flags. Rep. Justin
Amash, a Michigan Repub-
lican and frequent Trump
critic, tweeted last week that
“it’s certainly a big deal” if
Trump has contracts with
foreign governments.