For a lot of the history of the Republic, the nominees of the president both to serve in the executive branch and the nominees of the president to serve in the judicial branch.

Sailed through relatively quickly, it's a lot of red tape that's been added.

Like my confirmation took 14 months.

It's like night and day from the process that drafters of the Constitution intended.

As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period,

I'm sitting down with Jeff Clark, Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department

during the previous Trump administration, and now senior fellow and director of litigation

at the Center for Renewing America.

What are recess appointments? Why is Trump so interested in them?

Are there legal or historical precedents for them?

And how could they impact the effectiveness of this coming administration?

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick.

Jeff Clark, such a pleasure to have you on a This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellick.

Jeff Clark, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you, Jan. It's good to be here. I enjoy your show.

Well, thank you. So President Trump has indicated that he wants to use recess appointments to put people into his cabinet into other positions.

So, you know, like, explain to me what this is all about and why he might be talking about that so prominently.

Sure, and I think that's the right characterization.

I think he's thinking about using the recess appointment power and then how that relates

to another power I can describe in terms of how Congress takes recesses in the first place.

And it's a power that's been used many times before.

There are a lot of very important legal questions bound up in using that power, and there's

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