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Cabinet Making
Rich Galen Friday December 10, 2004
This is another UNBELIEVABLY BORING government and civics lesson for those who habitually cut third-period social studies and snuck out to the student parking to smoke cigarettes while watching girls' gym class as the girls played field hockey or, better yet, ran laps.
President Bush made five more announcements regarding his Cabinet yesterday. He announced four members of his current Cabinet who will be staying into his second Administration, and the filling of one vacancy.
The four Cabinet Members who will be joining Treasury's John Snow and Defense's Donald Rumsfeld as holdovers are:
- Elaine Chao, Labor
- Gale Norton, Interior
- Norman Mineta, Transportation
- Alphonso Jackson, Housing & Urban Development (Secretary Jackson is a Mullpal from our Dallas days and is a most gifted public servant).
The sitting Ambassador to the Vatican and former head of the Republican National Committee, Jim Nicholson will head up the Veterans Affairs Department.
This will mark yet another year when I will not have won a Nobel Prize, nor will I have been tapped for a Cabinet job. It will also mark another year when no pigs were known to have sprouted wings nor were there reports of Hell having reversed the trend toward universal warming.
I know you are wondering this, so I looked it up for you. This year the salary of a Cabinet Secretary was $175,700.
The six members of President Bush's Cabinet who are staying on compares well with the previous four Presidents since 1953 who had the opportunity to choose second-term Cabinet members:
- Reagan had six Cabinet Secretaries who started his first term and continued into the second
- Eisenhower had five
- Clinton had four
- Nixon (who resigned before many of his second term appointments did) had only one: Bill Rogers at State who was replaced by Henry Kissinger in September, 1973 which is how it was that Kissinger, as Secretary of State, received Nixon's letter of resignation.
There are currently 15 Cabinet Departments, but other officials hold "Cabinet Rank," such as the head of the Office of Management and Budget and Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
George Washington had but four members of his Cabinet, only two of which remain with their original names and general duties, State and Treasury. The Department of State was originally named the Department of Foreign Affairs but, if you've seen the film "Jefferson in Paris" you'll understand why it was changed.
A third, the Secretary of War is now the Secretary of Defense (the Service Secretaries - Navy, Army and Air Force - still exist, but at a sub-Cabinet level). And Postmaster General, as a Cabinet-level position, went extinct in 1971 with the establishment of the United States Postal Service.
There is nothing in the US Constitution which specifically creates Cabinet Departments, although Article II, Section 2, clause 1 supposes their creation when it gives the President the power to "require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices."
The Congress can, as it did with the Post Office, dismantle a Cabinet Department; it can also create one, or split one into separate pieces as it did when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (which was created in 1953) became the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980, with the education portfolio going to its own Department of Education.
Dear Mr. Mullings:
Isn't there anything amusing going on you can entertain us with?
Signed,
The National Association of People Writing from the Student Parking Lot
I am trying to get you through your first semester finals, little mister. And it's "with which you can entertain us"
When's gym class?
On the Secret Decoder Ring today: A link to the White House page on Cabinet members, a Mullfoto of the sign for a new restaurant, and a NEW link to an Iraq Flashback.
--END --
Copyright © 2004 Richard A. Galen
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