This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
A South Dakotan takes the top seat in the U.S. Senate. And another rides to the border and into the inner circle of America's next president.
We discuss the rise to power of John Thune and dig into President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet appointments. Plus, what to watch for during the confirmation process on Capitol Hill.
David Wiltse, Ph.D., is a professor of political science, and Lisa Hager, Ph.D., is an associate professor of political science at South Dakota State University.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Lisa Hager:
He is a seasoned senator, so I think it is natural that he would want to continue to elevate himself through Senate leadership. That's definitely always a goal that we see of members of Congress: trying to improve their own status within the chamber, in addition to obviously getting re-elected and making what they perceive to be good public policy.
But I think the other thing that's just noteworthy about Senator Thune is we've kind of seen things come full circle in terms of Daschle having that position and now Thune holding that position as well.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Dr. Wiltse, what would you add to that?
David Wiltse:
Well, I would split that a little bit. Most members of Congress care about rising through leadership and most members of Congress care about policy, and Thune obviously is one of these folks.
I mean, he's made a reputation for himself as someone who's both dedicated to the institution, dedicated to the policy process, and a good representative for the state of South Dakota, which distinguishes him from a lot of his colleagues on Capitol Hill, particularly on the House side.
His career in the Senate has been pretty standard in terms of what we traditionally think of as the normal pathway and the incentives laid out for people who want to rise in the institution.
And he's done that very well. I mean, you can't take anything away from his skills, both as a leader and as a legislator. You know, from day one, he was a very serious member of the Senate and he's made a mark for himself and gained the respect of his colleagues along the way. And it speaks pretty highly of him that he's been able to do this in the time that he's been there since 2004 or whenever it was that he first came into office.
Lori Walsh:
What are some of the things that have distinguished his career as a level-headed statesman and leader? Is that personality based?
I can't recall a moment other than the defeat of Tom Daschle, of course, where he did this enormous thing. He seems like a steady performer throughout every year.
David Wiltse:
Yeah. And that's exactly what it takes to rise through leadership and to gain the trust of your colleagues.
And when he came into office shortly thereafter, you saw the rise of the Tea Party and began to see this fissure develop within the Republican party of your more Tea Party reactionary types and the more institutional types.
And he has always kept credibility with the institutionalists. He is an institutionalist himself, I think, and this is probably one of the reasons why he was able to secure this job for himself this time around.
Lori Walsh:
Lisa, what does the Senate majority leader do?
Lisa Hager:
Obviously, he is the leader of the floor, so he gets the opportunity to really be the first mover on things that are happening within the Senate.
And so, in a more colloquial way of putting it, that's huge. Given the way the Senate works and being able to set the agenda, thinking about what's going on with the Trump administration, having that control in the Senate from a partisan perspective will be huge for President Trump and his agenda.
And I think to Senator Thune's credit, bouncing off of what Dave said, he's always been very good at adeptly handling what's going on within the Republican Party because that is something Trump's going to have to deal with is that there's not always complete agreement there. And Thune's always been really good at kind of navigating what those more institutionalists want and what some of the other more right-wing folks are interested in.
David Wiltse:
In general, the Senate, it's not as hierarchical in terms of the leadership there, so it's not as if he's going to have the same kind of powers as Speaker Johnson does over on the House side.
But when it comes to the agenda, when it comes to just putting things on the calendar, that's really where the majority leader can have an imprint. And clearly that's going to be important not just for all of these appointments, but for the legislative agenda as the next Congress unfolds in Trump's next term.
Lori Walsh:
So Lisa, where is the line between the Senate majority leader being the flag bearer for a president's agenda and also Congress' role of providing checks and balances against the executive branch?
Lisa Hager:
So I think it's one of those things where we see the president often working with leadership in Congress. Obviously, having the same party in control, the Senate or the House or both, is, of course, very important.
But I think just the fact that we have these somewhat slim majorities in both chambers of Congress and the fact that the Republicans do not always agree that party leaders are going to have to be working to communicate to President Trump what they think will or will not be successful and hopefully start bargaining and compromising even before things start percolating in those chambers.
David Wiltse:
And what I'm going to pay attention to is kind of rule changes we might see in the Senate. Right now, as it stands outside of judicial appointments and cabinet appointments and a few different kinds of appropriations, we still have the filibuster rule in place, the cloture rule in place, and we're going to see serious pressure to get rid of that.
So it'll be easier for the president to get his legislative agenda through with that 54, 53 seat majority they have.
Lori Walsh:
Okay. So say more about that. And here's the general thing I'm wondering. American democracy can be plodding, as in slow, and some people are frustrated like we don't have time to get things done. And there are these checks and balances and that can make things move slow.
And that traditionally was one of the frustrations that, I think, many people who want to send to Washington forget. That it's not run like a business, but it's not a business, it's a government. And there are things, there are structures in place that will slow down some of those things.
So what I'm hearing and what I'm understanding, and help me if I'm misunderstanding, is that some of these rule changes would speed the process up, but then they speed the process up for the person who comes after you as well.
David Wiltse:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
So if the opposing party is in office four years later, eight years later, they also have a swifter smooth path to enacting their agendas. So I don't know if I have a question more of a tangled mess in my mind.
So, as professors, what is this student really wondering?
David Wiltse:
Well, that's the thing with a lot of more institutionally oriented senators. They're thinking long-term here. They're thinking exactly what you just said. Well, it might be expedient for me and my party at this particular moment in time, but what happens when we lose our narrow majority and there's a new narrow majority? What does that do for the ability of the minority to frustrate the process and force some kind of bargaining to be had? And up until now, the Senate has been very hesitant to loosen these rules. It's only been as the result of serious crises, whether it's appointing judges and getting their confirmation through that they're willing to change these rules on cloture.
But we are at a point, especially with the president who is going to try to squeeze every little bit of his mandate that he can, that Thune is going to have to seriously consider and deal with these kinds of pressures to change those rules.
Lori Walsh:
Lisa, what would you add to that?
Lisa Hager:
Yeah. I think what we're going to see is if they do decide to actually change Senate rules in terms of the cloture vote, we're going to see things similar to what Dave was talking about with the confirmation of judges. So with the nuclear option where it just requires a simple majority to invoke cloture, you now have the situation where more extreme folks can find their way to the bench. And so we could see more extreme policies or just whatever the president wants if he has control of the Senate or his party does, I should say.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. I'm not sure I understand what invoking cloture means.
David Wiltse:
So just where you have to have a vote to close debate in the Senate in order to consider the bill. And right now the cloture rule for most things is 60 senators, so it's a supermajority that's required.
And, you know, like I said, they've just been changing this bit by bit, piece by piece over time to react to specific pressures. We did it with district judges and appellate justices during the Obama administration when there was this huge backlog of appointees not getting any consideration. And then the Republicans changed the rules to get, they changed it so that they could get their Supreme Court judicial nominees through for President Trump, so it's just, it's going to be hard to predict what they'll do and where someone like Thune would draw the line.
Lori Walsh:
Right. When we think of Mitch McConnell, we think of the U.S. Supreme Court and some of the things he was willing to do to enact an agenda that he wanted. And do we know what John Thune would've done, and as his right-hand man at the time, was he saying, yes, I would've done that too, or would you have done something different? Yeah. Again, it's hard to predict. Right?
David Wiltse:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
All right. So we're hearing these nominations, we're hearing these cabinet names thrown out. They're coming very quickly to us. Some of them are shocking to some people. Some of them are exciting to some people.
How important are these positions?
Obviously, Governor Kristi Noem been tapped to be Secretary of Homeland Security. We have Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. He's a Fox News analyst and a combat veteran. Matt Gaetz, obviously for Attorney General.
How important are these roles and how do they work with Congress? How will John Thune handle directing how they're appointed or how they're confirmed what their confirmation hearings are, but then also what are the consequences of like how closely are they going to work together?
Lisa, government powers, you're teaching this. Let's start with you.
Lisa Hager:
Yes. Yeah. Definitely.
Lori Walsh:
How does the cabinet work? These are not figureheads. These are people who make important decisions.
Lisa Hager:
Right. Yeah. So they're really directing the department that they are heading. And it really depends on the president how much of a role these folks play within the administration when it comes to policy.
What we've seen over time is a lot of moving away from really relying on their cabinet a lot and trying to centralize things as much as possible within the White House and relying more on White House staffers for a lot of the advice that they need relating to the policy areas that are under the jurisdiction of the departments.
And so there's a variety of different reasons for that. But a lot of times this concern that, you know, you have these folks with expertise or just this general interest in that particular policy area of the cabinet that they may get captured, so to speak, by the career bureaucrats and really kind of have their own minds with respect to what should happen on that policy area rather than thinking more nationally, like the president, where he has to balance all of these different policy areas. He definitely is putting more politically-minded folks in those positions. So again, that can kind of change what typically tends to happen.
Trump is always the exception, I feel like I'm always saying that when I'm teaching students about stuff. But some of the stuff still applies.
Lori Walsh:
The bureaucracy is self-sustaining. In some ways the bureaucracy supports itself.
How difficult would it be for an American president, Professor Wiltse, to make a meaningful and drastic change in those federal employees in civil service? I mean, can someone really come in and fire a bunch of people and put in political appointees?
Bureaucracy is there for a reason, and part of that reason is protective.
David Wiltse:
It would take cooperation with Congress because Congress is going to have to write a lot of civil service law in order to do the kind of transformative things that Trump wants to do to the bureaucracy. But that's not out of the range of feasibility right now. They could depending on how well he can manage his political capital.
But as far as reclassifying employees and these sorts of things, it's not something he can do on his own. He can certainly shake things up. They can make life very miserable for career bureaucrats and kind of incent them to leave and refill them, kind of backfill those positions with new classifications like they tried to do towards the end of Trump's first term.
So there's things that he can do more than just on the margins, but in terms of just wholesale changes to the bureaucracy. That's going to take cooperation with Congress.
Lori Walsh:
Do we have any sense of what J.D. Vance's role will be? Vice presidents have vastly different responsibilities and roles. Is there a place that he fits in naturally?
David Wiltse:
It depends on how the president chooses to use the vice president. So I wouldn't even want to guess what kind of role that Vance is going to take on here.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. So we have talked a lot during the election about J.D. Vance, who is now the vice president-elect, being from Ohio, and Governor Tim Walz from Minnesota, also a Midwesterner.
Now we have Noem, Hegseth and Doug Burgum from North Dakota. The Midwest influence on this cabinet is noteworthy.
But Dave Wiltse, you say that's not necessarily new either. We've seen a lot of Midwesterners have this kind of political power before.
David Wiltse:
Right. I mean, you go back to just about any presidency of the last a hundred years, and you're going to have scattered Midwesterners here and there. I mean, just in Biden's cabinet you have Janet Yellen and Pete Buttigieg from Indiana and Ohio, and I'm probably missing somebody that I just can't think of offhand right now.
And it always kind of depends upon the political landscape of the country at any given moment. And right now, the Midwest is part of this core of Republican officeholders. We've got states like Indiana, Ohio, the Dakotas, all the Great Plains just reliably Republican. So that's going to be a good ground to sweep up governors, senators, and any other officeholder that someone thinks is going to be a good cabinet official.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. What makes a good cabinet official?
David Wiltse:
Oy. That's a tough one.
Lisa Hager:
I think it depends on, again, the president and what they're looking for from their cabinet. There's always these different approaches where they're looking for folks with technical expertise or they're looking for people who really are similar to them, ideologically speaking.
Lori Walsh:
A big swing, I think also of just how different it can be. The Department of Interior, Governor of North Dakota has an oil background, and then the Biden selection, Deb Haaland, you know, being the first Native American woman to lead the Department of the Interior.
There's a little whiplash between those two. And does that show up in policy in the next four years, or is four years not enough time to change policies? I'm fascinated by all of it, and I don't have any answers. I only have questions.
David Wiltse:
On that one specifically, I can't see where this is going to have a huge effect. I mean, when it comes to, you know, the capacity of our oil industry right now, I mean, we're going gangbusters. We're now the biggest producer in the world. I'm not sure how we're going to do that more when it comes right down to it. So some of these things are just largely political.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
David Wiltse:
You even see this bleed into people's campaigns this time around. We got to end our foreign dependency on oil, and it's like, I'm sorry, what? Have you paid attention to things? We got rid of our ban on exporting because we have too much of it right now.
So I mean, a lot of it is just politicking. I don't see a huge change there from what we see right now. But who knows.
Lori Walsh:
I'm having a hard time imagining the potential Secretary of Defense, who doesn't think women should be in combat positions in the U.S. military.
I can't, having been in the military, imagine how you would change that. That would be an incredibly difficult policy to enact for operational readiness because of the number of women who are already doing these jobs and are in leadership. They have stars on their collars, some of these women. That would be a really difficult thing to go back on.
How hard is it to go back on things or to change things that are entrenched?
Lisa Hager:
It can be difficult, depending on the source of that particular mandate. So like we were talking about earlier where if Trump wants to completely restructure the structure of the bureaucracy, you know, you need a lot of help from Congress. So you often need a lot of help from Congress on a lot of these things. It just depends what it is that they're doing. You know, it might be something where they're implementing policy and it's more from the rulemaking perspective, so then they're going to be doing new rulemaking, but we still have procedures about how rulemaking works.
So it can be difficult. And I think one thing we're going to see is that it may sound good to say some of these things early on, and then when you really get into it and you start to see what is or isn't practical, we might see some things kind of getting scaled back.
David Wiltse:
And with him in particular, I'd really be surprised if he survives his nomination process. I mean, this was just one of those off-the-wall appointments that it's clear that it's some kind of loyalty test.
Again, kind of roping back to what we talked about with John Thune, this is the president basically throwing down and saying, go ahead. Stop me, if you dare.
Lori Walsh:
And that's what we're all waiting for. What will John Thune do next? What will he try to stop and what will he open the door for? He has a lot of power right now.
David Wiltse:
Yeah. Yeah. He does. And again, you know, we can't peer into his mind.
The Senate is not exactly your most transparent institution there is, especially when it comes to the scheduling of hearings, whether it be at the committees or the ultimate vote on the Senate floor. Who knows what's going to happen with some of these off-the-wall nominations.
But I would guess things like Rubio, Burgum, Noem, these are going to fly through. These are very normal appointments. Some people might not like these individuals, but when it comes right down to it, these are run-of-the-mill appointments that you would expect from any president, and I'm sure Thune is just going to let those sail through the process.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Yeah. Any final thoughts here as we watch in the days ahead? Anything you're watching for that you find is significant?
David Wiltse:
Again, I just, I'm looking to see what kind of rule changes the Senate might make to make some of these things more fluid. And if they're going to entertain this fakakta idea of recess appointments early in the congressional session.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. I still don't understand what a recess appointment is.
David Wiltse:
Well, if the Senate is recessed for 10 days or more, the president can make an appointment and that appointment is good 'til the end of that Congress. So that's basically a default two-year appointment.
Lisa Hager:
Yeah. So it gives you a chance to have Congress still process that nomination, but at least the position is filled in the meantime.
David Wiltse:
Yeah.
Lisa Hager:
One of the biggest issues is a Supreme Court decision where even pro forma sessions count as the Senate being in session. So basically they'll come in gavel in, gavel out when they're technically not in session and they're back home in their states. And so, yeah, it kind of limits the amount of recess appointments that can take place.
David Wiltse:
Yeah. Unless the Supreme Court revisits that, which they could. Yeah. Who knows?
Lisa Hager:
They keep us on our toes.
Lori Walsh:
What a great time to be teaching political science and government classes in higher ed.
David Wiltse:
Sure.
Lisa Hager:
Yeah. No. It actually is fun. There's always something relevant.
