If responsible underlings are getting those things done, or getting bad or illegal things stopped, that's a good thing.
Except, as Obama and others have pointed out, when 90% of what they
are doing is
bad or illegal things. The Gary Cohn example is a good one: he removed a letter or EO from the President's desk...
but somebody else put it there. When an executive is unaware of what is going on and has disloyal underlings they can, as apparently also occurred with Reagan (some have even called it "the Reagan protocol"), put things in front of him to further
their agenda knowing he would not get into the nuts and bolts of it, or maybe even read it. What we then have is government by fiat - which is where the list of judicial appointees came from. Remember that the Bush administration explicitly refused to consider
"competence" American Bar Association competence ratings.
The current administration has made it official (while explicitly lying about it, at the same time!):
“Like previous administrations,” Mr. McGahn wrote, “we will release information regarding each nominee in a manner that provides equal access to all interested groups. But we do not intend to give any professional organizations special access to our nominees.”
The Federalist Society, of course, is not a "professional organization".
