Now that Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has announced Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential pick — an unusual move for a presidential candidate trailing in the polls and weeks out from his party’s convention — speculation will inevitably follow about who front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might select as running mates. Not only should they follow Cruz’s lead, they should go a step further and, well before Election Day, publicly name the individuals they’d appoint as Cabinet members.
That Cruz’s approach isn’t already the norm is a weakness in the way we choose our chief executive.
The American public deserves to have at least a sense, before ballots are cast, of those who would hold the most powerful positions within the next administration. This is particularly true for the departments of State, Treasury, Defense and Justice, whose leaders are invested with authority over many of the core activities of the country — everything from negotiating treaties to overseeing federal criminal investigations at the highest level.
But not just the big four: the secretary of Health and Human Services oversees the single-largest slice of total federal spending; and the need for a competent and experienced secretary of Homeland Security is self-evident in an era when border security and the threat of terrorism weigh on citizens’ minds. Even the seemingly smaller Cabinet portfolios can wield influence over major areas of public policy, including Energy, Transportation and Labor. And all Cabinet members, by statute, are in the line of succession to the presidency.
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