The Power and Limits of Recess Appointments: Jeff Clark

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This is the 30 minute TV version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with Jeff Clark. The longer-form version was released on Epoch TV on November 26.

🔴 Watch the extended version of this episode: https://ept.ms/Y1126JeffClark

As part of American Thought Leader’s special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, Jan Jekielek discusses recess appointments with Jeff Clark, an assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice during the first Trump administration and now senior fellow and director of litigation at the Center for Renewing America.

Jeff Clark: “The recess appointments clause power, it exists. It exists in the Constitution. Hundreds of federal officials in the past have been confirmed using it from presidents of all parties. And it's clearly a power that exists in the Constitution, and it's one that can streamline a lot of this process. So that's the President's interest in it.”

What are recess appointments? Why is Trump so interested in them? Are there legal or historical precedents for them? And how could they impact the effectiveness of this coming administration?

CHAPTER TITLES
0:00:01 - The History of the Confirmation Process
0:01:00 - Recess Appointments and Presidential Power
0:03:44 - President Trump's Interest in Recess Appointments
0:08:50 - Protecting the American People vs. Streamlining the Process
0:13:44 - The Legal Brief on Recess Appointments
0:15:30 - The Power and Limits of Recess Appointments
0:22:49 - Conclusion

“For a lot of the history of the Republic, the nominees of the President, both to serve in the executive branch and the nominees of the President to serve in the judicial branch, sailed through the appointment process relatively quickly. It's a lot of red tape that's been added, like my confirmation took 14 months. It's like night and day from the process the drafters of the Constitution intended.”

According to Jeff Clark, the confirmation process has “become an opportunity for political gotchas. It's become an opportunity to slow the process down. Therefore, it's become a process to resist President Trump. He can't get his team fully in place until especially since we're talking about, you know, more than 1000 positions, you know, it's a big bottleneck to go through the Senate on each of those, right? And this is not the system that the framers really designed.”

“If the process were more streamlined, many more might want to serve, but they don't want to go through their whole life history. They don't want to be drugged through the newspapers. They don't. I don't want to be subjected to twisting in the wind potentially for months, like my confirmation took 14 months from the time that the papers went over to the Senate to the time that I actually started to serve.”

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