Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said something extraordinarily ridiculous last week, even to a senator whose response to a disaster in his state was to leave for Cancún.
Explaining why he plans to vote against confirming President Biden’s appointment as secretary of health and human services, Cruz complained that Xavier Becerra “has no experience in virology”.
“Will you hire me to remove your appendix?” asked the Harvard-trained lawyer.
The question does not seem entirely relevant, but as he asked, my answer is: No. I would not trust Cruz with sharp objects under any circumstances.
But Becerra is not being nominated for surgery on members of Congress – or even for deciphering viruses. He is being hired to manage federal health policy – to negotiate with other politicians, write regulations and manage an expanding bureaucracy.
Compared to that job description, Becerra’s resume as a former US congressman, followed by a stint as California’s attorney general, looks pretty good.
He is a highly competent politician and lawyer, not a doctor. And that’s what most cabinet-level jobs need – not technical experts, no matter how brilliant they are.
This is especially true at this point in the COVID-19 pandemic. Our problem is not basic research; the virus has been sequenced and we have three fully approved vaccines. The challenge now is political and administrative: shooting people in the arms.
Becerra has “zero experience in anything related to health,” said Cruz.
That was another strange statement. In fact, California’s attorney general has years of experience in health policy. He was a member of the House committee that drafted the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. During 24 years in the House, he also worked on dozens of other provisions designed to control drug costs and improve Medicare and Medicaid.
While in Sacramento, Becerra led the coalition of state attorney generals who fought a Republican-led effort to repeal Obamacare. And in 2018 he sued Sutter Health, the northern California hospital giant, for using monopoly power to keep prices artificially high; Sutter agreed to $ 575 million.
This sounds like health experience to me – and exactly the kind of experience Biden will want when he reaches his top post-pandemic priority to expand and adjust Obamacare.
Cruz and other Republicans did not always demand that the Secretary of Health be a scientist. President Trump’s last head of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, was a lawyer and former lobbyist for a pharmaceutical company.
Trump put a doctor in charge of the Department of Health, the surgeon who became Congressman Tom Price, but the experiment did not go well. Price was forced to resign after Politico revealed that he had spent at least $ 340,000 in agency money on private jet flights.
In the case of Becerra, Republicans have at least one substantive complaint: they disagree with their position on the right to abortion. He is in favor; they are opposed.
In 2017, Becerra sued the Trump administration for its decision to allow employers with “conscientious objections” to omit contraceptive coverage from their employees’ health plans. The Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of nuns, later joined the process on the president’s side.
This put Becerra in the middle of a legitimate, long-lasting, hot button debate. He holds the standard Democratic position; its Republican critics want their voters to know that they are defending conservative barricades.
But there is also a newer phenomenon at work here: the increasingly crude politicization of almost every Cabinet nomination.
For more than 200 years, the Senate has allowed presidents to nominate almost anyone they wish for seats in the Cabinet, unless a nominee has problems with criminal charges, unpaid taxes or other misconduct. The nominees were often confirmed unanimously.
Since the 1980s, borders have changed. Now, Cabinet confirmations often act as extensions of existing political debates between the president’s party and the opposition.
When Barack Obama was president, most Republicans voted against their nominees for Work, Tom Perez, and Education, John King Jr.
When Donald Trump became president, all Democrats voted against Betsy DeVos for Education and Price, the ill-fated doctor at Health and Human Services.
Now it’s Joe Biden’s turn. None of his nominees has so far passed unopposed. A Republican senator, Josh Hawley, of Missouri, voted against all 10 who reached the Senate floor. Cruz voted against nine out of ten (he let Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III pass). What the two senators have in common is that they are both candidates for the presidency – and the two tried to block the certification of electoral votes for Biden.
Some Republican institutionalists still vote the old way, leaving the president to make his choices. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rob Portman of Ohio and Mitt Romney of Utah resisted their party to vote for all 10 Biden nominees.
They did not join the chorus complaining that Becerra is not a research scientist – a good sign for the nominee, who is likely to be voted on next week.
They are right. A president’s office does not need a virologist from Health and Human Services, an architect from Housing and Urban Development, or a fighter pilot commanding the Pentagon.
The most talented cabinet secretaries in recent years have been generalists, not experts. George P. Shultz, who held four cabinet-level positions, was a professor at a business school – an expert in management. Leon E. Panetta, who had three, started out as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, like Becerra.
If Biden is appointing competent politicians and managers instead of surgeons, economists or astronauts, this is a good thing.
A government’s success usually comes down to an art that many presidents neglect: running the government well. Just ask Obama, whose biggest stumbling block was the poor implementation of his health plan. He did not need a virologist; he needed better managers.