Peter Kastor, Washington University in St. Louis

The new U.S. Senate is getting down to business, and one of its first tasks will be to consider Donald Trump’s nominations to federal office.

Trump himself has suggested his preference for recess appointments for Cabinet members. This would avoid the traditional confirmation hearings in the Senate, which are increasingly polarizing, drawn out and partisan.

Discussions of the nominations have included many references to the founders and the process they supposedly devised for confirming nominees.

Yet the founders, in fact, had very little to say on the subject. The Constitution states that the president “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.”

That’s it. The Federalist Papers, the editorials and pamphlets arguing in favor of ratification that so many students read in high school and college, didn’t add much else on the topic of federal appointments. And the founders did not explore the subject in detail in their own correspondence.

Crucial Senate function

I am a historian who has spent nearly two decades exploring the federal appointment process. I recently launched Creating a Federal Government, 1789-1829, a major digital project that reconstructs the federal government during its first decades.

The Senate considered more than 5,000 nominations to federal civil office from 1789-1829, and I’ve combed through the correspondence of the early federal administrations to understand their approach to this crucial Senate function.

The first presidents were adamant that the confirmation processes should be public and transparent, with Senate oversight. The early Senate was keen to preserve its power over appointments but afforded the president broad discretion in building the executive branch.

What this meant was that “advice and consent” was not decreed as a set of formal rules. Rather, advice and consent took form in practice and emerged from the day-to-day needs of government.

The founders’ model: Transparent inefficiency

George Washington, the first president of the United States, operated from the assumption that the president and the Senate should be actively involved in approving even the lowest-level officials.

After early nominations for the likes of Thomas Jefferson, the first secretary of state, and Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, Washington personally nominated hundreds of customs collectors, low-ranking officers in the military and territorial officials. One of the first of these came on Aug. 3, 1789, when Washington dispatched the names of 139 nominees for “Collectors, Naval Officers and Surveyors for the Ports.”

There was barely a federal office that Washington did not think the Senate should consider. His only exceptions were clerks, postmasters and enlisted personnel in the military.

The Senate itself was smaller back then, ranging from 22 members from 11 states when Washington was inaugurated in 1789 to 48 members from 24 states when John Quincy Adams left office in 1829. There were no hearings, nor much in the way of formal vetting. Rather, the Senate discussed nominations among themselves, often voting the same day.

Recess appointments rare

This collaborative system was designed to exemplify checks and balances. But it was also an inefficient one that consumed the president’s and senators’ time and energy.

The process was especially busy at the start of a congressional term, and the Senate Executive Journal – the only detailed account of early Senate proceedings – shows barely a week went by without considering nominations.

Washington’s successors likewise dispatched thousands of names to the Senate on lists often written in their own hand. The Senate responded by devoting much of its daily agenda to considering these nominees.

And the results tell a story: Just as presidents believed that the Senate must be involved with building the federal workforce, senators apparently believed that presidents should have broad discretion. They confirmed over 90% of the nominations they received from 1789-1829, according to my analysis.

This remained the case even during the first period of divided government from 1801 to 1802. The Federalist majority in the Senate consistently approved President Jefferson’s nominations, even though he was from the opposing Republican Party.

Jefferson initially saw considerable partisan advantage to federal appointments. In 1801-1802, for example, he removed 146 customs officials he believed were Federalists and eagerly sought Republicans to take their place. But Jefferson also kept on numerous officials appointed by his Federalist predecessors because he valued their competence – and institutional stability.

From the 1790s through the 1820s, these early presidents rarely used recess appointments, my research shows. When they did, it was primarily to fill vacancies created by death or resignation, after which they quickly submitted formal nominations once the Senate returned.

The modern model: A divided system

The U.S. began shifting from this relatively constructive give-and-take among the founders in the late 1820s.

When Andrew Jackson came into office in 1829, he proclaimed that to the victor go the spoils, and that included appointments. He treated appointments as a reward for political allies, no matter their qualifications.

Jacksonian patronage became the target for progressive reformers in the late 19th century. They claimed that the spoils system produced a federal system that hired unqualified employees and rewarded political allies rather than serving the general public. They believed civil service reform would produce an effective, efficient and nonpartisan federal government.

Those reforms, combined with a growing federal government that contained too many offices for the Senate to consider, laid the groundwork for today’s structure in which Senate confirmation is reserved for higher-level offices, most of which change with each presidential administration.

Vast majority still approved

Reserving advice and consent to high-level positions has shifted the focus of the Senate and the attention of the public entirely to high-value offices and nominees with greater political experience.

Broadcasting confirmation hearings, a practice that began in the 1980s, has only increased the sense that they’ve become political theater. It has made the process more transparent but also created greater opportunities for all involved to convert hearings into political grandstanding.

Yet for all those recent developments, the vast majority of nominations are nevertheless approved. This is especially true for non-Cabinet and lower-level posts.

For positions such as U.S. attorney, assistant secretary of state or director of the Bureau of Land Management, presidents usually submit nominations to the Senate when the Senate is in session. The Senate in turn usually confirms with spirited discussion but limited opposition.

All presidents have made use of temporary appointments, and some nominations generate major public controversies, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

And the process of nominating people for those offices remains a remarkable link to the earliest years of the republic.

The rules, however, are changing.

The first Trump administration used temporary appointments far more often than his predecessors. And he may do the same in his second term.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate faced criticism for dragging their feet on nominations to important civil and military offices during the Obama and Biden administrations.

These recent developments constituted breaks from long-standing practices and profound breaks from how the Founding Fathers imagined the process of advice and consent.

Peter Kastor, Professor of History & American Culture Studies, Associate Vice Dean of Research, Washington University in St. Louis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tim O’Brien, Harvard Kennedy School and Tim Freeman, Harvard Kennedy School

Picture yourself living the American Dream. You likely have more opportunity than your parents did. Through hard work, smart choices and perhaps some good luck along the way, you have financial stability and a great deal of freedom to choose your next steps in life.

Chances are also good that you live in or near a vibrant community with a robust local economy.

We tend to focus on the individual aspects of the American Dream, but we also value our communities – our downtowns, little leagues, good schools, safe public spaces and local traditions. Individuals and families tend to seek out the places that provide these things along with nearby jobs. And when communities begin to lose these quality-of-life assets, residents notice. Younger people tend to migrate away.

But why do places that were once vibrant sometimes lose this quality?

This is a question that we have reckoned with as economists who study constraints to better economic growth, most recently with the state of Wyoming. We’ve found that there is an often overlooked factor shared across many different places, and understanding it is critical to helping such communities recover.

Why communities enter cycles of decline

Whether a community thrives or falls into an economic tailspin depends greatly on its ability to generate “tradable income.”

Tradable income is jargon for money generated from stuff that a local economy sells beyond its borders. This could be the crops people grow, the products that factories manufacture, the services that businesses sell, or the minerals that are pulled from the ground. This income is then circulated within the local economy in the form of demand for other jobs, such as cashiers, barbers and handymen. Tradable income is essential to import all the goods and services that are not produced locally.

Without tradable income, the rest of the local economy will struggle to survive. You can think of tradable income like the oxygen that circulates through the body of the local economy.

Rural economies nearly uniformly have fewer and less diversified sources of tradable income than urban economies. They may rely on the same main source of tradable income that was the reason the community was settled in the first place.

These economies are much more vulnerable to existential economic and environmental shocks and downward spirals of community decay than urban economies, which have built up more diversified tradable income sources over time.

Regional economies that were built on extracting and selling a natural resource, for example, can face booms and busts based on resource prices or government policies. The sudden closure of a mine can, within years, begin to wipe a community off the map. This is even though most jobs in the community were not directly supplied by the mine. The deeper and often overlooked problem is that the tradable income was tied to the mine.

This process is nothing new. It is the reason why the West has many ghost towns, and why many once-strong manufacturing towns transformed into the Rust Belt. In small communities, a regional school or even a Walmart can have the same effect if it closes, since these can be the sole sources of outside money.

The loss of any critical source of tradable income, if not replaced, deprives the local economy of the oxygen that it needs to survive. Without new sources of tradable income, downtown stores close because businesses lack demand, joblessness rises, local tax revenue collapses and people leave.

Federal funding has a design flaw

State and federal policy has never been particularly effective at enabling local economic transitions from old sources of tradable income to new ones, or even softening the blow.

Today, it is not hard to see how climate change – as well as efforts to fight it by shutting down fossil fuel extraction and power plants – can bring new and painful shocks to local economies, just as automation and globalization have done.

The Biden administration’s recent push to build infrastructure and jump-start strategic industries – including through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act – was partly driven by a desire to provide economic opportunity to parts of America that have increasingly been left behind.

Recognizing that different places have different needs, these federal efforts tended to channel resources to communities through discretionary grants rather than formula funding. In other words, the system put the responsibility on community leaders to identify funding opportunities and compete for that funding through proposed projects meeting predefined criteria, rather than have resources divided according to population or some other formula.

A key problem, however, is that most rural places do not have the local government bandwidth and staffing to navigate this system.

Town clerks and part-time local officials are often responsible for many public jobs and do not have the time or resources to navigate what can be byzantine federal funding systems. They do not have the time to absorb the flood of webinars, newsletters and online tools that federal agencies have created to circulate opportunities, let alone to mobilize successful grant applications for complicated programs with short application windows.

Not surprisingly, federal funds have tended to flow to larger municipalities with greater resources to begin with.

Wyoming, a largely rural state, is an example. The state is receiving less per capita in federal discretionary grants than most other states, and those grants are reaching relatively few communities. Our team at the Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy School has been working with officials and residents there to find solutions.

Many folks in Wyoming believe that qualifying criteria for grants have purposefully disadvantaged the very conservative state. There are some criteria for qualifying for programs that fuel this narrative, such as grants targeted to coal communities that match the demographics and income levels of Appalachia more than Wyoming. Similarly, the lack of Medicaid expansion in the state lessens federal funding flows.

However, the main reason is much simpler and more mundane. Small and stressed communities from Wyoming to Vermont, across the political spectrum, face the same systemic obstacles in navigating the system.

Government can do better – here’s where to start

Statewide efforts have grown, including in Wyoming, to help local leaders identify and access federal grants, most importantly by building staffing and help centers that local leaders can draw upon to help navigate the federal system. But we believe a fundamentally better system is possible.

Rather than federal entities creating highly specific grant programs, inviting communities to apply and compete, and selecting winners centrally, they could flip the script when it comes to rural communities in regions that are facing shocks to tradable income.

Federal entities could instead work in concert with each other and with local leaders, starting with the place-specific needs of regional economies, and develop custom projects accordingly. Instead of shopping around centrally designed programs, federal agencies could do more to empower and support locally determined transformation efforts.

This was the spirit of the Recompete Pilot Program of the U.S. Economic Development Administration, which awarded six large grants last year among many, many locally driven proposals from economically distressed areas. A similar shift in approach was a key takeaway of the federal government’s Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization, whose recent progress report looking back at three years of work emphasizes a greater need for working with, rather than imposing on, local leaders and coalitions.

Developing new pathways for tradable income will rarely be easy or fast, but this is one better place to start.

Tim O’Brien, Senior Manager of Applied Research, Growth Lab, Harvard Kennedy School and Tim Freeman, Research Fellow, Growth Lab, Harvard Kennedy School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jue Liang, Case Western Reserve University

Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

Title of the course

Ghosts, Zombies and Monsters: What We Fear and Loathe in Religions

What prompted the idea for the course?

I am an expert in Tibetan Buddhism, women and gender, but not in ghosts, zombies and monsters. However, my experience teaching introductory courses on Asian religions and religious studies prompted me to grapple with the challenge of teaching students the importance of understanding the people whom we feel are “other” and come to terms with things that do not make sense.

These fearsome, “other-than-human” beings live on the boundaries of our moral, social and emotional imagination, and they often embody the issues, concerns, hopes and fears that have shaped our lives. Therefore, they are the ideal pedagogical candidates to challenge one’s preconceived notions of death, self and the other.

What does the course explore?

The course is divided into three thematic sections. First, we reflect on ghosts, examining how different cultures provide specific definitions of death and imaginations of an afterlife. We read about Buddhist hungry ghosts, or “pretas,” and Chinese ghost stories. We also explore discussions of hauntings in a Thailand airport as well as the experience of ghost hunters in North America. Ghosts are often believed to be beings who failed to transition to an ideal afterlife and linger in a liminal state, interacting with and haunting the living.

Second, we examine zombies. These are considered another type of liminal beings who are regarded to be alive but have lost the distinct stories that make each of them a unique individual, according to scholar of monster theory Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. We explore the Haitian origin of zombies and the phenomenon of the “uncanny valley,” the eerie feeling we may experience when encountering something that appears almost human but not quite.

Last, we look at monsters. Monster theories and the study of monstrous beings as a cultural category have grown into a flourishing field of inquiry in recent decades. This has opened many avenues for exploring beings typically regarded as categorically different from humans.

The class explores monsters as disastrous animals, gendered beings, exiles from their religious communities and names evoked in news reports to describe individuals who have committed particularly disturbing crimes. We ask questions such as why some animals are more likely to be seen as frightening or malicious than others, and what is gained and lost by calling someone a “monster.”

Why is this course relevant now?

Ghosts, zombies and monsters are as ancient and as contemporary as the humans living with them. We will probably never stop fearing, being disgusted by or projecting some people among us as “monsters.” However, at a time when fear, disgust and labeling carry unusual weight in shaping relationships in our own community, I believe critically reflecting on how we engage with difference and otherness is an urgent call. Monstrous and demonic beings also ultimately occupy a place where boundaries are constantly pushed and redrawn. What was monstrous once might be no longer now, and vice versa.

What’s a critical lesson from the course?

This course brings to the fore what is commonly demonized, marginalized or unseen in religious traditions across the globe, and it asks what it is about ghosts, zombies and monsters that appalls and arrests us. One lesson students take away from the course is that our fears and horrors are always culturally and contextually specific. In other words, ghosts, zombies and monsters are also reflections of ourselves.

What materials does the course feature?

We watch three films, one for each section: Masaki Kobayashi’s “Kwaidan,” Jordan Peele’s “Get out” and Penny Lane’s “Hail Satan?”

Students also become familiar with a variety of narratives – both serious and humorous – about ghosts, zombies and monsters, ranging from “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio,” a collection of supernatural stories, to Key & Peele sketches about Satan or the zombie apocalypse, and Haruki Murakami’s short story “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.”

What will the course prepare students to do?

Good storytelling plays a crucial role, as it allows us to temporarily inhabit another, imagined world. Many of my students revealed their talent for storytelling during a class session where we went around the room sharing spooky tales. In the act of telling each other stories, we begin to understand and navigate our differences.

Students are not going to become professional demon tamers or ghost hunters after this class. Instead, I hope they leave with a newly found recognition, if not tenderness, toward creatures and things they originally were afraid of or felt repulsed by.

Jue Liang, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Case Western Reserve University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.