Although your ballot will list only one name for each political party’s presidential candidate, a vote for president entails far more than selecting one person for the nation’s highest office. It involves placing a vast team of thousands of appointees impacting every activity of the federal government (which endeavors to oversee virtually every human activity).

While the presidential candidates may run as “moderates” or “centrists,” their appointees often reflect the views of their party’s ideological base. A vote for president is, in fact, a vote for a small army of bureaucrats, judges, and faceless apparatchiks who will guide the interpretation, implementation, and direction of the law for perhaps a generation to come. This may give a better overview of what is at stake in a presidential election.

1. Federal Appointments

Most Americans know the president appoints Cabinet members, advisors, and an ever-increasing number of “czars” to oversee federal agencies. But these are only the most visible tip of the nation’s bureaucratic iceberg. How vast? The president appoints so many federal employees that even experts disagree about how many there are. “For years, the Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition has written that new presidents generally fill more than 1,200 such positions. By contrast, Vanderbilt Professor David Lewis — one of the leading authorities on presidential appointments — has compiled a list of 1,340 Senate-confirmed positions. Why the discrepancy?” asks the Center for Presidential Transition. “[G]etting a single number is quite difficult.”

In 2016, the president appointed 4,013 positions across the federal government:

• 1,242 positions that need Senate confirmation
• 472 positions that do not require Senate confirmation, for various federal boards and councils
• 1,538 Schedule C employees, who hold confidential clearance and help shape policy
• 761 non-career Senior Executive Service (SES) positions, which help lead the bureaucracy and make up about 10% of the agencies

The surest truth in politics is this: Personnel is policy. Given the chance, Kamala Harris will appoint more people like Sam Brinton, the lipstick-wearing nuclear official who stole women’s luggage; Richard “Rachel” Levine, the transgender-identifying health official who reportedly pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to drop age restrictions for transgender procedures; and Chai Feldblum, a former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission bureaucrat lionized by the Left for once declaring that if there is any “conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty … in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win.” Republican administrations have given us public servants such as Chad Wolf, Tom Homan, Roger Severino, Betsy DeVos, and even FRC’s own Meg Kilgannon.

The most important presidential appointments come as lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court. The Obama-Biden-Harris axis has placed Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court (despite the last’s inability to define a woman). But the president also makes hundreds of lifetime appointments to lower federal courts. President Donald Trump appointed 220 federal judges during his four years in office; Joe Biden has appointed 213.

“Those are lifetime appointments,” David Closson, director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, told Jody Hice on “Washington Watch” last Friday. “For decades to come, folks who have been appointed by Joe Biden will be making decisions across this country that are going to affect us. And we know the two oldest Supreme Court justices are Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas: They’re, respectively, 76 and 74 years of age. The next president very well could name their replacements.”

“Judges, religious freedom, all of these issues that matter deeply to evangelical Christians are going to be on the ballot,” said Closson.

2. Choosing Which Laws to Enforce

As every high school civics student knows, the executive branch enforces the laws. However, the executive branch increasingly refuses to enforce laws on the books and enforces some that have never been passed — always with the eye of advancing radical social policy and punishing their political enemies.

Former President Barack Obama decided not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, a law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, which was signed by his most recent Democratic predecessor in office. Obama also interpreted federal civil rights laws as though they applied to people who identify as LGBTQIA+. The Biden-Harris administration engages in similar sleights of hand. Although federal law requires the deportation of every illegal immigrant, the Biden-Harris administration virtually curtailed the deportation of criminal aliens — illegal immigrants who committed other crimes against U.S. residents. They ignore the Comstock Act, which bans the mailing of abortion pills through the mail, and encourage abortion pill distributors to violate state pro-life laws with federal cover.

Under the Trump administration, each department has a representative overseeing religious liberty. Under Biden-Harris, every department focuses on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

The Biden-Harris administration has interpreted Title IX as though it forces adolescent girls to change in front of males and threatened school districts that do not comply with losing federal funding for their low-income lunch programs. This administration emphasizes other laws, such as the FACE Act, by attempting to punish peaceful Catholic dads like Mark Houck, priests and nuns, and elderly Holocaust survivors such as Eva Edl with more jail time than some violent criminals.

As the nation learned during the shameful Crossfire Hurricane investigation and subsequent “Russian collusion” hoax, the president and his appointees can designate enemies for federal surveillance. A list of “extremists” from the Southern Poverty Law Center can see pro-life advocates, Latin Mass Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians who support the canonical church in Ukraine branded as potential domestic terrorists and targeted for the Big Brother treatment, invading their privacy and trampling on their constitutional, civil liberties.

Perhaps no person is more cognizant of the government’s vast, punitive powers than Kamala Harris. In a 2019 speech, the former prosecutor described the punishment that could await those after one “swipe of my pen”:

“You know the power I have as a prosecutor is that with the swipe of my pen, I can charge someone with a misdemeanor for the lowest level offense possible. And by virtue of that swipe of my pen, you will have to go to a courthouse and stand in line. You will have to come out of pocket and hire an attorney. You may get arrested for a few hours. You will be embarrassed in your community. You will miss time from coming [to work], all because with the swipe of my pen, I’ve tried to charge you with a crime, which I may choose to dismiss two weeks later. It’s an incredible amount of power.” 

Unlike other Harris speeches, she does not serve up word salads and equivocations when discussing how she can destroy other people’s lives. She’s lucid. She’s articulate. She has clearly thought out the power she’ll have — and how she will use it.

3. Foreign Policy

More than any other area, the president has an almost completely free hand over foreign policy. The United States has seen this play out, as the Biden-Harris administration has freed up billions of dollars for Iran, the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism. It sent Americans to build a ramp to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip, putting them in harm’s way for a short-lived project that helped no one except the terrorists.

The world stands at the brink of World War III thanks to three decades of misguided, uniparty policies. As Bob Marshall has noted at The Washington Stand, the State Department intelligentsia across administrations broke America’s promise not to expand NATO, increasingly dictated the very make-up of Ukraine’s government, and rejected ceasefire agreements between Ukraine and Russia. Increasingly bellicose rhetoric over a nation whose fate does not directly impinge U.S. national security could put Americans into harm’s way yet again.

The president’s war powers are less appreciated than perhaps any other federal power. As the law is currently interpreted, the commander-in-chief can get the United States into war without a congressional vote. Although the president has always had the power to rebuff attacks on U.S. forces, the War Powers Act unconstitutionally allows the president to engage in aggressive warfare for up to 90 days without congressional authorization. Even after he lost the 1992 election, George H.W. Bush sent U.S. soldiers to Somalia to fight warlords stealing international aid; Bill Clinton expanded the mission, leading to U.S. soldiers being killed and having their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Clinton bombed Orthodox Christian Serbia on Easter to empower the Kosovo Liberation Army, which was aligned with al-Qaeda and Iran. Obama tilted foreign policy toward the Muslim Brotherhood by forcing U.S. troops to destabilize Libya.

The presidency also defines America’s moral position in the eyes of the world. The Biden-Harris administration has directed foreign embassies to promote the LGBTQIA+ agenda worldwide, particularly in African nations that hold traditional views. President Donald Trump, by contrast, promoted Christian religious liberty around the world.

The president can also undermine national sovereignty by signing global treaties and pacts, such as the WHO Pandemic Agreement, favored by the Biden-Harris administration. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization.

Presidential elections extend far beyond choosing one person to occupy the Oval Office for four years. They allow Christians to choose whether the government’s army of policy gurus, regulators, and prosecutors will help or oppose their efforts to “Occupy till I come” (Luke 19:13). Choose wisely.