Austin oversaw the worst catastrophe humiliation in U.S. history with the withdrawal from Kabul. Under Austin, we had two theater-wide wars, and we were very ambiguous, ourselves, on whether to support Israel fully or to give them necessary munitions. Or what was our position about Ukraine?
Give them enough to win, but not lose or just prolong that war, that cost 1 million lives? So there’s a lot of inconsistency.
And now we look at the upcoming nominations, specifically RFK and Patel. And I think it’s going to be very, very close again. I expect both Collins and Murkowski to vote against Patel and to vote against RFK.
And it’ll depend on whether McConnell is there. A couple of other things I want to point out in the past as well: Betsy DeVos, remember, resigned early in anger at President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. But I don’t think she remembers, fully, that when she was nominated, she was more controversial in 2017 than was Trump.
She was the only Trump nominee who got the entire Democratic side against her. And again, Murkowski and Collins joined the Democrats. That said, after she was confirmed, she turned out to be, I think, a spectacular secretary of education. She went after the teachers union, she tried to make reforms with higher education, she looked at illicit donations from China to major university campuses.
And yet, she would not have been confirmed if it had been up to those two Republican senators. Contrast that with the most recent secretary of education, Miguel Cardona. I don’t think we’ve seen a worse secretary. He was in power during this outbreak of anti-Semitic, anti-Israel violence throughout the United States on major campuses, from Oct. 7, 2023, to Jan. 20, 2025.
He said nothing. He was pressed to say, “Do you condemn the anti-Semitism?” He would say nothing because he was a hard leftist. Nobody really knew who he was before he was selected as education secretary. And nobody knows who he is now after four years.
And yet, two Republican senators suggested—I shouldn’t say suggested; they voted—that he was more qualified than DeVos, whom they opposed. So the Republican Party, once again, has a big problem that they don’t have the discipline and the solidarity that the Democrats do. And they have to count on Vance and these particular cases to save them from themselves.