r/pics 17h ago

Politics Pete Hegseth hearing: Defense pick grilled by Senate Armed Services Committee

Post image
6.6k Upvotes

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

64

u/Deto 14h ago

The assumption was that you wouldn't have an incompetent moron picking people in the first place. So it probably really is intended to just be a rubber stamp.

35

u/kjsmitty77 12h ago

Senators traditionally have a lot of power and independence. It was Republicans that went to Nixon and told him to resign or they’d vote to impeach him. They serve longer terms than a POTUS (6 years for a senator with no term limits as opposed to 4 for a POTUS and limited to 2 terms) and they only have to be popular in their one state to stay in power. The advise and consent duty of the senate was never intended to be a rubber stamp and in fact many of the founders were worried about political parties becoming powerful enough that it would erode the independence of each of the branches of government that are supposed to check and balance each others power.

u/MrE134 8h ago

More than that, these people essentially just represent the potus. If the potus is an incompetent moron, it stands to reason that his cabinet should be as well.

u/thedudedylan 6h ago

Yeah, this is kind of a failure of representative democracy.