What should the Senate do with President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominations? Certainly, it should not follow the advice of Senator Josh Hawley, who said Trump is “entitled to his Cabinet.” Nor should it follow the example of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who ritualistically opposed virtually all of Trump’s first-term Cabinet nominations.

The Cabinet is effectively maintained by Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution requiring Senate confirmation of “officers” if not exempted. That provision was not an accident; it was the result of a compromise between champions of a unitary executive like Alexander Hamilton and advocates of a plural executive on the Swiss model including George Mason, Edmund Randolph, and Elbridge Gerry.

Senate confirmation, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 75, “would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity … He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”

The position of the Cabinet, at least theoretically, has since been slightly enhanced by the ungainly 25th Amendment, which allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to unseat the president after declaring him unfit to serve. There have been only nine rejections of Cabinet nominees by the Senate in American history. The two most recent were the rejection of Lewis Strauss as secretary of commerce, in part a by-product of Strauss’ rivalry with J. Robert Oppenheimer, and of President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of former Senator John Tower as secretary of defense, ostensibly because of problems with alcohol.

But the requirement of Senate confirmation is not a paper tiger. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his dissent in Myers v. United States in 1925 would have required even postmasters to be confirmable and even irremovable by the president. “The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power,” Brandeis said. “The purpose was not to avoid friction but by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of governmental powers among three departments to save the people from autocracy.”

This reasoning should imply, at the least, careful scrutiny of those in charge of public forces, particularly of the secretaries of homeland security and of defense, the attorney general and the director of the FBI. The post-Watergate reforms sponsored by Attorney General Edward Levi also significantly required a 10-year term limit for the FBI director; whether he is removable at pleasure remains undecided following Director Chris Wray’s recent decision to depart the role early in his term.

Whatever one’s sympathy with Trump’s larger aims on foreign policy, the border and social issues — and I am sympathetic to them — there should be careful scrutiny of his nominees Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and Kash Patel. Nominees must be reminded, by adverse votes if necessary, that they are not to take the oath of personal loyalty to the president that the German generals took to their leader before July 20, 1944, and which then-President Trump tried to exact from former FBI Director James Comey.

Hegseth, the defense secretary nominee, has made some indiscreet utterances, though there is no compelling evidence of alcoholism as critics have alleged. Noem has been an imprudent governor of South Dakota on COVID-19 policy and other issues. Bondi has been criticized for assisting Trump’s efforts to dispute the 2020 election. These nominees, and the president, are owed fairness, but no presumption of deference. Freedom from fear, especially for political actors, is what habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights are all about and must be preserved.

George Liebmann, writing in his personal capacity, is president of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar.