Drumpf has named General James Mattis, USMC retired to be his choice for Secretary of Defense, which is fine if he gets re-elected because the General can’t take the office until 2020, 7 years after he retired.
The 7 year restriction on military officers and the anti-nepotism laws are not new. Maybe someone should show Drumpf the rules for these appointments.
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Of course, Congress has exempted someone from the 7 year requirement before, when they allowed General George Marshall to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense. Given the other candidates that Trump has proposed for SecDef, they might well do so for Mattis.
As for how I feel about Mattis’s appointment… under ordinary circumstances, I’d be appalled. He’s a horrible candidate for SecDef… under ordinary circumstances. On the other hand, if Cheetoh Mussolini decides to, say, use the military to seize the New York Times building and execute the reporters therein…. well. I’d much prefer Mattis to be the SecDef in that case than anybody else that I can think of at the moment. Mattis has read his history. He knows what happens at that point — and what the repercussions will be when he does what he has to do.
Marshall was a very special case. He had already served as Secretary of State under Truman, and as a five-star general he never actually retired, he went into reserve status after serving as Truman’s Secretary of Defense.
Congress is going to have to pass legislation for Mattis to take the job. ‘Betray-us’ would need a Presidential pardon and exemption legislation.
OT: Be careful clicking on your “Also” link to cheezburger. I got caught in a very nasty page storm attack which could only be cured by a brute force shutdown. It doesn’t seem to have done anything beyond annoy me, but we’ll see.
I thought all the script kiddies grew up to get jobs at the NSA… :-/
Sorry about that, Anya. It must have been in an ad because I have Adguard running on my box and have no problem. I installed Adguard because Eset kept having fits about various annoying attacks embedded in ads on otherwise legitimate sites like the BBC.
I’ll pull the link.
In a continuing resolution that Congress just passed to keep the government from shutting down, they already put a provision for an exemption that would allow Mattis to become SecDef. So it appears that little legal issue was trivial in the end. All the Republicans have to do is convince a handful of Democrats to vote with them, and likely they’ll have no problems finding a handful of Blue Dogs to do so.
The House passed it and adjourned for the year, but it isn’t a slam dunk in the Senate.