Democrats just don’t get it. Donald Trump was elected with a mandate by the U.S. voters to shake up the “Deep State” of bureaucratic insiders to get our country back on the right track.
Trump is already accomplishing that with some cabinet nominations that appear purposefully designed to send entrenched political operatives scurrying off the ships like rats.
The Beltway establishment is imploding at such a pace, we fear the popcorn supply will soon be at risk.
And yet U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel of North Carolina — a southern state not unfamiliar with going rogue against the federal government — wants fellow Democrats to create a backroom shadow government to replace the one to which Trump is currently taking a sledgehammer.
He wants Democrats to appoint a shadow cabinet — and get this — make U.S. Sen. Mike Bennet the Treasury Secretary.
Leave it to Democrats to create a make-believe treasury and appoint a Colorado liberal to oversee how our money should be spent.
In addition to Bennet, Nickel wants the new senator from California, Adam Schiff to be the shadowy attorney general, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith of Washington State as shadow defense secretary, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro could step in as shadow secretary of health and human services.
Granted, Nickel’s intention is this:
“Across the Atlantic, the British have something we don’t: a team from the opposition that mirrors the government’s cabinet members. They watch the cabinet closely, publicly challenging, scrutinizing and offering new ideas. It’s another form of checks and balances — a quiet guardrail that keeps power accountable.”
The Parliament’s official page describes their shadow cabinet as the official opposition to the elected government that “seeks to present itself as an alternative government-in-waiting.”
No matter how hard Nickel tries to associate the U.S. form of government with our British counterparts, he would do well to remember we rejected it outright a few hundred years ago in yet another war.
Bennet as treasury secretary? What a laugh. We wouldn’t trust him to hold his wife’s purse.