The Harder the Change, the Tougher the Vote

(L–R) Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and Ranking Member Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) speak during a confirmation hearing for President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 14, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Commentary

We’re in a weekslong process of confirming nominees of the Donald Trump administration for these 13 Cabinet-level positions. And I think it may go on all the way through February, given the Democrats’ strategy to oppose, wherever possible, the confirmations.

There’s a general rule, though, that we can make sense that, I think, will apply—has applied to Pete Hegseth. It will apply to Kash Patel, especially, RFK Jr., and others.

And that is three things: The more important the Cabinet position is, the more controversial the vote; the more likely a Republican nominee is going to try to make fundamental and needed changes, the more controversial the vote; and the more that senators in swing states worry about being reelected, the more controversial vote.

Put that all together, and on the Republican side, there’s usually going to be two to three votes that are going to be ambiguous: Susan Collins in Maine, Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, and here and there, Mitch McConnell. Take the Pete Hegseth recent nomination confirmation, that was only the second time in nomination history for a Cabinet post that the nominee was completely deadlocked and the vice president, in this case JD Vance, interceded to break the vote. That had only happened one time before, when Mike Pence came in and ensured that Betsy DeVos would be confirmed.

Why was that necessary? Because three senators obliterated the Republicans’ 53 Senate margin; Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and of course, Susan Collins. Looking back, we have to ask ourselves, do they really believe that Pete Hegseth is going to be a worse defense secretary than Lloyd Austin in retrospect? Lloyd Austin was AWOL for a week.

Lloyd Austin oversaw the worst catastrophe humiliation in U.S. history with the withdrawal from Kabul. Under Lloyd 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 Kash Patel. And I think it’s going to be very, very close again. I expect both Collins and Murkowski to vote against Kash Patel, to vote against RFK.

And it’ll depend on whether Mitch McConnell is there. A couple of other things I want to point out in the past as well, Betsy DeVos, who remember, she resigned early in anger at Donald Trump after Jan. 6. But I don’t think she remembers, fully, that when she was nominated, she was more controversial in 2017 than was Donald Trump.

She was the only Trump nominee that got the entire Democratic side against her. And again, Sen. Murkowski and Sen. 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 antisemitic, 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 antisemitism?” 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 no one knows—we’ll know where he’ll be in four years.

And yet, two Republican senators suggested that—I shouldn’t say suggested—they voted that he was more qualified than Betsy 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 JD Vance and these particular cases to save them from themselves.

Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.