Senate Confirmation Battles Are About More Than Individual Nominees | Opinion

Pete Hegseth was narrowly confirmed as defense secretary amid swirling questions about his competence and character, and despite GOP Senators Murkowski and Collins standing up and opposing him. Others who had expressed reservations, like Iowa's Senator Joni Ernst, were targets of pressure campaigns and primary threats and voted for him in the end.

There is much more at stake in this and upcoming Senate confirmation votes than whether unqualified or unsuitable nominees get key positions in our government, monumentally important as that is. Our entire constitutional system hinges on senators not being rolled by the president or his proxies into ceding their power to the Executive.

Some 1,300 presidential appointments—Cabinet secretaries, federal judges, officers of the armed forces, U.S. attorneys, ambassadors—require the advice and consent of the Senate. That's a constitutional duty all senators have. If they fail to use their power in deference to something else—a president, a political party or religious affiliation—they neglect their sworn duty, the Constitution loses, and the system fails.

If a president or a party tries to constrain the Senate's powers, say by threatening to primary senators who won't fall in line and drop reservations about a nominee, the senators must push back, even if it means jeopardizing their political careers.

This imperative is enshrined in their oaths of office. You may have noticed in their swearing-in ceremony that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance took quite different oaths, which is by design. They both pledge to defend the Constitution of the United States. But while the Vice President takes the same oath Senators take, including to "bear true faith and allegiance to the [Constitution] and to "take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion," the president makes no such undertaking.

Trump could, in fact, harbor lots of mental reservations and evasive purposes regarding the Constitution and still not violate the oath as written. The Constitution provides neither a standard for determining if a president violates the oath, nor any method to enforce it if a president is unwilling to hold himself or herself to it. That's because it's the job of Congress and the courts to do that.

This points up the separation of powers where the Executive has a degree of autonomy and powers other branches don't, but also the indispensability of checks and balances on presidential powers by co-equal Judicial and Legislative branches of our government.

The Founders deliberately designed the system this way to limit concentration of power of any one branch. They foresaw and expected presidents to jealously guard their prerogatives and assert more and more power, but they also empowered Congress to stand in their way, guard its prerogatives and assert its power.

In the Federalist Papers (51) James Madison explained, "The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachment of the others."

Madison recognized the dangers of factionalism and populist politics where "there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual." He saw independence of the branches of government, diversity, debate, and dissent as key to protecting the rights of the minority from the majority, and the rights of the majority from the zealous overreach of a minority.

The difference between the presidential vs. the senatorial oaths of office reflect this design. The more iron-clad language of the senatorial oath came from the Civil War era, to exclude Confederate supporters who might harbor mental reservations about keeping "true faith" with the Constitution. But this problem is older than that, and endemic to our system. Executive overreach and contention between branches of government have been with us as long as we've had a republic.

Although George Washington set a powerful example by peacefully transferring the office of the president to John Adams, Adams still had reason to worry adulation of Washington would lead others to try to concentrate and abuse power, overturning the constitutional order. He wrote to his wife Abigail, "From the situation where I now am, I see a scene of ambition beyond all my former suspicion or imagination; an emulation which will turn our government topsy-turvy. Jealousies and rivalries have been my theme, and checks and balances as their antidote, till I am ashamed to repeat the words."

Adams' exasperation at having to invoke the system of checks and balances again and again rings true today. Some critics have gotten impatient with it and complain of its inefficiency. It may be that top-down governance structures like monarchies, one-party states, and businesses are more "efficient" at implementing their agendas by rolling over dissent. But what our system of checks and balances may lack in speed, it makes up for in limiting government overreach and engaging diverse interests and voices.

Today, the system is under stress as the Executive branch flexes its muscle and tests the boundaries. This has happened before and will likely happen again. Across our history many paid heavily with blood and treasure, careers and lives, to preserve and protect this intricate system designed to ensure our freedom. Senators need to stay strong, keep their oaths, and recognize that if not for the sacrifices and courage of predecessors who protected the Constitution, even at great personal cost, there wouldn't be a Senate as we know it. We should all heed Adams' exhortation: "Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it."

Jonathan Granoff is president of the Global Security Institute. He is senior adviser and representative to the United Nations of the Permanent Secretariat of the World Summits of Nobel Peace Laureates, senior adviser to the Committee on National Security of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association, and a fellow and trustee of the World Academy of Arts and Science. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.