Sanders For Secretary of Labor With One Reservation

I started looking at the lefty mags and podcasts and YouTubes to see the inevitable slamming of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and see that In These Times says Bernie Sanders is lobbying to be made Secretary of Labor.  If Biden can be assured that he would be replaced by a Democrat from Vermont I say let him give him the job,  if the Senate won't confirm him to it, Biden should do what Trump did and arrange that he have it on a permanent temporary basis in fact.  It would give us a chance to see if the great claim of the Democratic Socialists is true, that the voters would prefer their policies on labor if only they knew it (and why didn't that work with healthcare any better than it did?) it would perhaps rightly give the socialist and socialist curious an important reward for not ratfucking the party this time and it would give Bernie Sanders something to do in his, no doubt, last public position.  I don't see any sign that Sanders is at all debilitated by his age, I doubt that he'd fall asleep in public like Wilber Ross does and he wouldn't drool like Trump does.   

I have every confidence that Bernie Sanders would not try to break any laws to pursue economic justice, I think he might even do a great job.  I have been very critical of Sanders when he was acting as a pseudo-Democratic carpetbagger and, especially, his cult but I do have some respect for him.

One thing is clear, though, Biden should not remove any Democrats from the Senate where they might be missed and, as we found when Massachusetts put the Republican Ken doll in Ted Kennedy's seat,  even in the most reliably Democratic state it's not an entirely sure thing that a Democrat will replace them.  It is one of the dumbest things that Obama and Bill Clinton did, to weaken the Democratic caucuses in the legislative branch.  If he chooses to not appoint Sanders for that reason he should make that clear to the public.  And if Sanders is really devoted to the issues he has championed, he should accept that as a valid reason for not making the appointment.   Though, as I say above, giving it to him on a de facto basis if the Senate won't confirm is something I have no problem with.  Given what we've seen in Republican-fascist controlled Senates and the often less than rigorous confirmation process even under Democrats, I'm not much bothered if a Democrat bypasses that disgusting body.