Last semester, in one of my Fall 2016 classes, a student who has some military personnel in the family made favorable recognition of James “Mad Dog” Mattis as Trump’s intended nominee for Secretary of Defense.  And indeed Mattis does have some credentials for the job.  But apparently he’s also showing signs of sensibility by strongly objecting to some of Trump’s other intended picks for that department, and it’s causing some friction, according to this January 6 Washington Post story.

Generally speaking, Trump seems to want people in his administration who will reinforce his prejudices and his simplistic ideas about policy, rather than people who will educate and challenge him, so it will be interesting to see how well Trump takes being challenged by Mattis.  There are also some protocols that Trump doesn’t seem to want to follow.  For instance, if Mattis is going to be his Secretary of Defense, should he have to turn on the 6:00 news to find out whom Trump plans to nominate as Secretary of the Army?

Trump’s administration may well be marked by a constant state of crisis over personnel.  After all, when people say “he’s a businessman” and call that a credential for being president, they’re missing a key point:  Trump is used to having people work directly for him, be on his payroll, and have no purpose in life besides taking orders from him.  How well is he going to adjust to the fact that that is not exactly how things work when you’re the president of the United States?

These next four years are going to be interesting.  I don’t expect them to be fun–I’m not having the slightest bit of fun right now as I think about it–but they’re going to be interesting.

Donald Trump doesn’t take office until January 20, but the new Congress resulting from the November 8 elections is in session now.  The Republicans have a majority in both the House and the Senate, which of course means that they control the leadership positions and the committee chairs.  In the House, following the so-called Hastert Rule, it means that a bill that the majority of Republicans don’t favor is unlikely to come up for a vote, even if all of the Democrats and a chunk of the Republicans want to pass it.  So the Republicans effectively control the House.  However, the Republicans do not have a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate–it’s 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats there–which means that most bills in the Senate are subject to minority filibusters.  Thus, in the Senate, the Democrats are in a position to demand concessions from the Republicans before any bill passes that chamber.

The Republicans right now are totally in dragon-slaying mode over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare.  Their plan is to pass a repeal act that allows time, like maybe three years, to come up with something to replace it, but they don’t have the replacement plan ready yet.  There are actually parts of the current arrangement that they are willing to keep, like protection for people with pre-existing conditions and the ability of young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plans.  Under other circumstances–that is, if partisanism were not so intense and so bitter–we would be seeing not a Republican repeal but a bipartisan effort at revision of the ACA, because the Democrats are not denying that the current ACA setup can use some tweaking.

Another major order of business on Capitol Hill right now is confirmation hearings for Trump’s  nominees.  Remember, most White House staff (including Chief of Staff, Chief Strategist, and National Security Adviser) do not have to go through Senate confirmation, but prospective cabinet secretaries, federal judges, and a number of other categories of nominee do have to be approved by a simple majority vote in the Senate.  Now, here’s another key point:  Back when the Democrats had a simple majority in the Senate and the Republicans were using the filibuster to obstruct confirmation of Obama’s nominees, the Democrats took a rules vote and abolished the filibuster for confirmation of all positions except Supreme Court justices.  That means that, while the Democrats can force confirmation hearings to drag out a while, they can’t obstruct the confirmation vote with the filibuster, except for Supreme Court spots.  And Trump does have a number of controversial nominations ready for hearings now.

And, of course, there’s the matter of the Russian hacking.  This is actually the biggest issue on which there’s the prospect for an early falling out between Trump and the Republicans in Congress, because the Republicans in Congress consider it a terrible thing that the Russian government appears to have hacked American computer systems and purposefully tried to influence the election in Trump’s favor.  It is infuriating to Republicans as well as Democrats when Trump makes these cavalier, dismissive remarks about American intelligence agencies, like putting the word intelligence in quotation marks in one of his tweets.  Relations between Trump and the Republicans in Congress will be one of the most important areas of drama to be following.

On the right side of this page on the OpenLab site are links to the news feeds for the Times, Politico, NPR, and TheHill.com.  I urge past, present, and future students of my American Government classes to look in on them and catch up on what’s happening down in Washington and around the country, as we enter what promises to be the most bizarre period in American politics of our lifetimes.