With that I named an Associate Attorney General, a Deputy Solicitor General, two U.S. Attorneys, and ten Federal Judges. (A recess appointment of a Supreme Court Justice might well be unconstitutional; the Senate had officially expressed their displeasure after Eisenhower did it three times; I didn't dare try that one!) I had spoken to all of them beforehand, and all were stashed in hotels in Washington, waiting for this moment. There was no way for the Senate to reconvene in time to stop this. I did, however, warn each of the people involved that the Senate might well refuse to confirm them, and that some, if not all of them, might be out of a job in a year's time. While most of my nominees were Republican, as a bipartisan gesture I had named three Democrats as Federal judges, and they had all grinned and said they were the safest of the bunch.
Well, there's nothing quite like throwing bombs into a packed crowd to get the adrenaline pumping! The Democrats in the Senate were foaming-at-the-mouth mad at me for being so presumptuous to deny them their Constitutional duty to advise and consent. How dare I act so illegally! This was worthy of impeachment!
Despite it being a recess, Harry Reid and Arlen Specter, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was where all the nominees were bottled up, managed to make it onto television that night. Unlike Harry, Arlen and I got along okay, but he was under orders from Harry to put a cork in the bottle. Both men were in full blown high dudgeon, and demanded that I cancel these illegal and ill-considered appointments, and promised a court fight when they got back from recess.
They might actually be right. The idea of a recess appointment dated back to the 18th Century, when the Senate was out of session more often than not, and a President couldn't afford to wait months to appoint somebody. In theory, he could appoint somebody as needed, and they would stay in office until the end of the current Congressional session, at which point they would need to be confirmed by the Senate to keep their job. This worked fairly well up until the 20th Century, when travel speeds had increased to the point the Senate could actually stay in town longer. Theoretically the Senate was in recess whenever they were out for more than three days, which is why I waited until Thursday to do this. On the other hand, ever since Clinton had been President, the Senate had begun having sham sessions. They would go away, and every third day some Senator, whoever was in town, would show up, bang a gavel, say they were in session, bang the gavel again, and go back into recess. It was total fakery.
Screw it. I threw it back in their laps. I claimed the sham sessions were just that, fakes, and dared them to push me on it. It would take a court challenge to throw the nominees out, or they would simply have to stop taking so many recesses and actually get some work done once in awhile. They could scream all they wanted, but in the meantime, the Justice Department was fully staffed. When the Dems started screaming on the Sunday morning news shows, our response was always that these were perfectly qualified people, most of whom had previous experience in the Federal justice system, that the delays were nothing more than political gamesmanship by the Democratic Party, and actually, what was the real problem? That I had candidates that weren't qualified, or that I was calling a halt to their little game of sham sessions? In the meantime, the President was giving this tempest in a teapot the consideration it deserved, which wasn't much. He was going to keep on serving the people of the United States, even if the Senate refused to.
It was a hullaballoo, all right. Not all of the Republicans liked my stunt, since one of these days they would have the whip hand over a Democratic President, and besides, this was saying that they weren't that important, either. I sort of apologized to them, but held firm, and suggested that they start beating on the Dems about this. Push the bipartisan nature of what I was trying to do. Push that we needed a full Supreme Court. Push that it was costing the American taxpayer by delaying court proceedings. Wrap these appointments in an American flag and fly the damn thing!
By March, Reid caved in. We allowed a token Democrat and a token Republican judge to be non-confirmed, after negotiating with both of them (they both found lucrative positions in the private sector), confirmed everybody else, and scheduled confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominees. Harry Reid and I kissed and made up on television, in a wonderful bipartisan show of support. As I stood next to him I debated wearing body armor.
In March we had hearings on Katrina and Rita and the Federal response. As predicted, Mike Brown was front and center for almost a week, as every Democrat reamed him a new one and every Republican praised him to the sky. Not a damn one of them cared a lick about what happened, but they all wanted air time and sound bites to use during their upcoming campaigns. Unsurprisingly, the formal report was scheduled to be issued after the election, and early indications indicated that despite the rhetoric coming from the Congressional hearings, most of the problems were going to be blamed squarely on Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco. Mike Brown resigned right after the July 4th holiday, and we jointly introduced his replacement at a Press Room briefing, and I sent him out with a party and a public commendation. Screw Harry Reid!
That was just part of what happened between the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2006, of course. Katrina was just one of the issues I had to face. Right now I was continuing the slow and steady pace I had always proclaimed. I wasn't cutting taxes. We seemed to be at a good point for reasonable economic growth and a moderate surplus. The surplus paid off the older debt and gave us a cushion for disasters, like Katrina. As always, it was better to have a disaster with money in the bank than having to borrow it. Meanwhile we had cancelled enough pie-in-the-sky military programs to free up the funds to ramp up training and begin a pivot away from Europe and towards Asia. The F-35 was dead, as was the next generation Navy destroyer/cruiser package, and I had ordered a new frigate design instead of the ridiculous 'Littoral Combat Ship' that the Navy had pushed. Support assets had been heavily beefed up, and we had massively expanded and improved our facilities on Guam and the surrounding islands. Interestingly, some of our local allies seemed rather heartened by this. They could see the Chinese putting huge sums into their own military and were getting nervous. The Philippines, for example, had previously kicked us out, and were now making gestures at allowing us access to the old Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base facilities. Meanwhile we were drawing down our assets in Europe.
Overseas, we were continuing to keep the lid on things without having to invade anybody. I had small Special Forces teams assigned to the Kurds. North Korea I was pointedly ignoring. The current South Korean administration was making accommodating noises to their northern brethren, who were waving the nuclear flag and demanding money. I told the South Koreans they could do what they wanted, but the U.S. wasn't coughing up a dime, and we weren't making any concessions. Iran we had sanctions on, and we kept them in place, and thumbed our noses at them and Iraq in general. Afghanistan had settled down into a nice little civil war, and we were providing low levels of support to the Northern Alliance. We were also kissing up to India, to try and wean them from the Russians, and keep the Pakistanis under control.
The wheels began to come off that finely crafted strategy in February of 2006. Turkey announced they were building a new oil pipeline extending to the Iraqi border in Kurdistan, and were looking forward to making a deal for Kurdish oil with the semi-autonomous government in Erbil. At that point Saddam Hussein began mouthing off. The Kurds were nothing more than a bunch of rebels (true) and the oil was the property of the Iraqi people (read that as his property.) The Iraqi nation demanded that Turkey break off their illegal theft of Kurdish territory and property. Also, the Kurds should behave and get in line to allow him to kill them off easier.