At the Hegseth hearing, GOP senators covered themselves in shame (original) (raw)

A gross dereliction of duty on the part of the Republican-controlled Senate and the Trump-directed FBI. That is a harsh but unavoidable assessment of the confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth to serve as Donald Trump’s defense secretary. Both institutions should be ashamed of their performance — Republican senators most of all, as, bullied by the president-elect and intimidated by deep-pocketed, no-holds-barred pressure campaigns, they abdicate their constitutional advice-and-consent responsibility.

I have witnessed many contentious confirmation hearings over the years and watched as the system has become increasingly partisan and vitriolic. But the Hegseth hearing represents a new low in that diminished process.

The seriousness and breadth of the allegations against him — from sexual assault to excessive drinking to sheer lack of experience — demand the most searching and responsible of inquiries. Instead, the Hegseth nomination has largely produced reflexive party-line salutes.

What unfolded during Tuesday’s hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee was the continuation of a relentless lack of curiosity — an utter absence of willingness to take the constitutional role seriously — that has marked this nomination from the start. If the GOP goal is getting Hegseth across the finish line — well, mission accomplished, it appears. If the point was to determine whether he is fit for the job, abject failure.

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Hegseth, a former Fox News host, dismissed allegation after allegation against him as “anonymous smears.” But not all the allegations are anonymous, as Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) pointed out. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported this week that Republican Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Susan Collins of Maine refused the opportunity to meet with the woman who claims Hegseth sexually assaulted her at a conference in 2017. (Hegseth, who was married to another woman at the time and had just fathered a child with the woman who later became his third wife, said the encounter was consensual.)

In any event, anonymous is not equivalent to untrue, and Hegseth did not — he could not — explain the astonishing array of accounts of his extreme public intoxication. Moreover, Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly observed, Hegseth simultaneously argued that his is a “redemption story” of a changed man who had overcome past problems and that he is the victim of a coordinated smear campaign. “It can’t be both,” Kelly said.

In one particularly laughable but illustrative moment, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin (Oklahoma) defended Hegseth against charges of drunkenness and womanizing by suggesting that his colleagues were equally culpable. “How many senators have showed up drunk to vote at night? Have any of you guys asked them to step down and resign from their job?” he asked. “And don’t tell me you haven’t seen it because I know you have. And then how many senators do you know have gotten a divorce for cheating on their wives?” Playing another round of whataboutism is not the way to determine fitness for duty.

In contrast to the behavior of previous nominees from both parties, Hegseth refused to meet with Democrats on the committee before the hearing. In contrast to the practice at previous hearings, Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) refused Democratic requests to allow senators more than a single seven-minute round of questioning. Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the committee’s ranking Democrat, noted that the confirmation hearing for Obama defense secretary Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator, stretched to three rounds of questioning. What did Wicker have to fear from allowing his colleagues across the aisle to try to do their jobs? This was an exercise of political brute force, not senatorial responsibility.

Only Wicker and Reed were permitted to review an FBI report that Reed described as “insufficient.” The FBI failed to question Hegseth’s second wife, despite her expressed interest in being interviewed. It didn’t speak to the woman who accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her — and was paid by him in exchange for executing a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t obtain the forensic audit of a veteran’s organization Hegseth ran that found “evidence of gross financial mismanagement.”

Mayer reported that “the F.B.I.’s background investigation also failed to interview Fox News personnel who had described Hegseth to NBC News as smelling of alcohol on the job as recently as last fall. Instead, sources say that the Bureau settled for an interview with a public-relations official at Fox.”

The FBI’s role here is troubling, because the bureau is supposed to serve as the Senate’s chief source of reported and reliable information about the individuals whose nominations it is considering.

But as we have seen before, most notably in the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the FBI is caught, or has allowed itself to be caught, in an untenable situation: The bureau has argued that the scope of its inquiries is limited by the directions it is given, in this case by the Trump transition team. But the Trump team’s goal is to win confirmation, not to get to the truth of the matter — which makes a Trump-directed FBI investigation worse than meaningless; it makes it effectively a coverup. A responsible Senate that took its constitutional responsibilities seriously would not stand for this.

But that previous sentence assumes facts not in evidence. Most Republican senators are dutifully obedient to Trump and his demands, even if they privately know better. Those who might consider straying — that is, doing their jobs — are subjected to the threat of unbridled and well-financed attacks and the looming threat of a primary challenge. This is not a responsible Senate. It is a partisan and cowering one.