The cabinet-related news was coming fast and furious yesterday. Here’s a recap with a few updates that you might have missed.<\/p>\n
* Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, resigned today<\/a>. He’s the eighth cabinet member to go in less than a month. Mark McClellan is the leading candidate to replace Thompson, which I think is utterly ridiculous<\/a>.<\/p>\n * Replacing Ridge at DHS will be Bernard Kerik, the New York police commissioner during 9\/11. The Washington Times reported<\/a> that Rudy Giuliani was “the first choice to replace Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, but that he declined the position and recommended Mr. Kerik.” (I wonder if Giuliani has a slightly better job in mind.) Kerik, meanwhile, will probably be even more partisan and ideologically driven than Ridge — you might recall that Kerik once told a reporter<\/a> that his greatest fear is another terrorist attack and, “if you put Sen. Kerry in the White House, I think you are going to see that happen.”<\/p>\n * Nebraska Gov. Michael Johanns will take over at Agriculture, which is throwing Nebraska politics into turmoil<\/a>. Johanns had been slated to take on Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson in 2006, so this may be good news for the Dems.<\/p>\n * John Danforth resigned after only five months on the job as Bush’s ambassador to the U.N. He reportedly wanted to replace Colin Powell and was disappointed when Rice got the job. More interestingly, NBC reported<\/a> that the White House was “unhappy” with Danforth, and found him “inflexible” and “sanctimonious.” We might be hearing more about this one in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n * On Monday, the Post reported<\/a>, “One senior administration official said Treasury Secretary John W. Snow can stay as long as he wants, provided it is not very long.” Yesterday, Reuters said<\/a>, “Expectations [Snow] would survive President Bush’s Cabinet make-over for at least six months are rapidly yielding to a belief he may make a hastier exit.” Apparently, the far-right wants<\/a> former Sen. Phil Gramm to get the job.<\/p>\n At this point, I’d say Bush is a near-lock to break Nixon’s post-WWII era record of nine cabinet member changes between first and second terms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The cabinet-related news was coming fast and furious yesterday. Here’s a recap with a few updates that you might have missed. * Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, resigned today. He’s the eighth cabinet member to go in less than a month. Mark McClellan is the leading candidate to replace Thompson, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}