Cabinet Appointments Quotes

Politics is a pure meritocracy. That's why Gordon Brown's cabinet had two brothers and a married couple in it. They just happened to be the best people around.

We want it to be a post- election coverage of the president-elect.

The fact that we have people who have headed up oil corporations now assigned to places in cabinet.

Well, we're just a couple of weeks from new President Barack Obama being sworn in. And he's been very busy naming a lot of cabinet positions. And today he announced that he wants the surgeon general to be TV Dr. Sanjay Gupta. That was the kid on 'American Idol,' wasn't it?

I think the Senate ought to realize that I have to have about me those in whom I have confidence; and unless they find a real blemish on a man, I do not think they ought to make partisan politics out of appointments to the Cabinet.

Well, you know, Thomas Jefferson, who was the author of the Declaration of Independence said he wouldn't have any atheists in his cabinet because atheists wouldn't swear an oath to God. That was Jefferson and we have never had any Muslims in the cabinet.

The transition is probably the most important part of the President's administration.

I think President Obama wanted to have the right fit for his different cabinet positions, and I believe that experience is what mattered most to him. In my case, I have been working to improve the overall quality of life for working families for most of my adult life, and I think that experience resonated with the president.

Presidents are only seen on August 15 and January 26. Who knows what they do for five years other than this?

I worry about the lack of experience that Rex Tillerson has had on the diplomatic front and, frankly, I think that's true for many of the appointments to [Donald] Trump's cabinet.

Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet because, whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was 'How can we get this country through this time of crisis?'

I'm not talking about Trump's brand but rather the intimately connected brand called "make America great again" that he created to make all these promises to working Americans - is intensely vulnerable, if there is sustained scrutiny of the kind we've seen about Comey and Russia. He's appointed five Goldman Sachs former executives to his Cabinet, his commerce secretary is renegotiating NAFTA to make it far better for corporations and worse for workers, and they're talking about this right out in the open... I mean, how much news have you seen about that?

Donald Trump and Sean Spicer do one thing after another to keep the media attention focused on them. And it works. These legislative achievements are being made which are chipping away at anything the government has that's of any use to anybody. Paul Ryan, I think, is the most dangerous guy in the government. He knows what he's doing. And it's very systematic. I presume he's behind the cabinet appointments, but it's pretty amazing that every single cabinet appointment is somebody devoted to destroying that part of government.

Every single one cabinet appointment: education, environment, labor - every single one is selected to undermine any aspect of government that's of any help to people, and that doesn't benefit the super-rich. And it's absolutely systematic. The interesting question will be how long Donald Trump's constituency can fall for the con game.

From aloof academics to career government cronies, President Barack Obama filled his Cabinet with individuals whose greatest achievements were dreaming up unworkable Democratic utopias from the far off perches of academia and Washington bureaucracy.

Presidents ought to get the appointments they want for the cabinet and then be responsible for them.

It is extremely chilling that Donald Trump views the spectacle of choosing cabinet appointments in a way that is similar to deciding whether or not to fire Lil Jon or Joan Rivers.

The people that Donald Trump is putting around him on the Cabinet suggest that he's putting together a very conservative, almost traditionally conservative Republican group around him.

I'm not going to say that all the cabinet appointments of the men and women, you know, obviously we might have some reservations on some, but the women's movement has congratulated them for some of the appointments and is urging and encouraging more women in the Executive Branch and high areas.

If I were now presiding in the Supreme Court of the United States as Chief Justice, I should feel entirely at home, but with the troubles of selecting a Cabinet and the difficulties in respect to the revision of the tariff, I feel just a bit like a fish out of water.

If our system of cabinet government is to work effectively, the prime minister of the day must appoint ministers he or she trusts and then leave them to carry out that policy.

We would like, still the numbers to increase, and so we're hoping that there's far - there will be many more women in the cabinet. It appears there will be and we're hoping that will happen. And - but the ones that have been picked, by and large, we have worked with. There's a couple that we haven't, but there - they look like their bio's are great and so we're - we're pushing on.

Jimmy Carter began his planning in the early summer of 1976, Ronald Reagan a year prior. The Clinton Administration, elected in 1992, lingered in naming its team, and as a result, took almost a year to staff its ranks.

The conversation should've been about middle class people. The conversation should've been about how to raise the minimum wage and strengthen Social Security. But then we started talking about this whole email stuff again. And now the outcome is that, you know, Donald Trump has somebody who he's looking at to put on his Cabinet who's a lobbyist to privatize Social Security.