Nominees up for approval but Dems won’t make it easy
Amita Swadhin, an Indian American genderqueer activist and sexual abuse survivor, will be among witnesses testifying at a Senate hearing starting Tuesday to confirm Jeff Sessions as president-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general.
Swadhin is being fielded by Democrats, who are expected to subject some of Trump’s nominees to close scrutiny. Five of the nominees are up for confirmation this week, including those for state, Rex Tillerson, and CIA, Mike Pompeo.
Swadhin was sexually abused by her father for eight years. At 13, she reported him to authorities and later came out as genderqueer and founded Mirror Memoirs, which helps child abuse survivors among LGBTQs of colour.
The LGBTQ community has opposed Sessions’ nomination as “deeply disturbing” and his record of voting as a senator against same-sex marriage will be prosecuted aggressively by Democrats in the hearing.
But Sessions and all other Trump nominees are expected to be cleared by a Republican-controlled Senate, though Democrats have seemed determined to not roll over, and have called for slowing down the process.
They have sought time to adequately vet the nominees, their tax records and conflicts of interest. The Office of Government Ethics, which monitors and implements the government’s ethics programme on the executive branch, has said its review process for several of the nominees has not been completed.
Democrats are saying Republicans are trying to “jam through” the confirmation process. Republicans, on the other hand, argued they are trying to ensure Trump has his nominees confirmed by the time he assumes office.