The New Yorker:

What does parading nominees around Capitol Hill before their confirmation hearings actually accomplish?

By Antonia Hitchens

This week, on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives held a floor debate over whether to make a congressional time capsule. The proposed legislation mandates that the Architect of the Capitol, the agency responsible for maintaining its buildings and grounds, create the capsule, which would be filled with “institutional milestones of Congress” and then buried under the West Lawn until 2276. It was the final Monday afternoon of the year before Congress adjourned for the holiday recess. As I watched the time-capsule debate, staffers for the Architect of the Capitol were at work on the West Front, building the seating platforms for Donald Trump’s Inauguration next month. “It’s thirty-four days until President Trump takes the oath of office, but he’s already begun the power of the Trump effect,” Speaker Mike Johnson said, at a news conference.

Part of that effect could be detected, over the past several weeks, in the series of Trump Cabinet nominees traipsing around the Hill to court senators whose votes they’d need to get confirmed. Trump made his selections quickly, then watched from Florida as they made their rounds in Washington. Matt Gaetz, the pick for Attorney General, was first, showing up before Thanksgiving with J. D. Vance and hunkering down in the Strom Thurmond Room to receive senators who were concerned, among other things, with his alleged sexual misconduct involving a minor; when it became clear that Gaetz, who denies wrongdoing, couldn’t get the votes, he dropped out, making way for Pam Bondi (Attorney General No. 2)—and Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense) and Tulsi Gabbard (director of National Intelligence) and Kash Patel (F.B.I. director)—to roam the Capitol hallways.

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