Matt Gaetz Will Test the Limits of Senate Republicans’ Fealty to Trump

James Wallner, a former Senate aide and consistent critic of Senate dysfunction at the GOP-leaning think tank R Street Institute, said the recess appointment debate was overblown.

“Like everything else in politics, in the Senate in particular, you have to take it with a grain of salt,” he told NOTUS. “From an institutional standpoint, it doesn’t in and of itself undermine the separation of powers the way some have been suggesting.”

Wallner advocates a Senate very different from the one modern politics is used to, where leadership has less power over what happens and individual senators work together in a more open process. He said it remains to be seen if new procedural rules crafted by the freshly minted majority leadership team will result in the kinds of changes he wants.