SCUFFED CABINET
Fight in Senate looms on Joe picks
Ambitious Senate Republicans are taking potshots at President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet choices, setting up the potential for bruising confirmation battles in the early days of the new administration.
“What a group of corporatists and war enthusiasts — and #BigTech sellouts,” Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) snarked on Twitter last week, after Biden introduced his picks for diplomatic and security positions.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, an influential member of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, piled on.
“Sounds a lot like a return of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, and that foreign policy had disastrous consequences for our nation,” he told Fox News on Wednesday, singling out Homeland Security secretary nominee Alejandro Mayorkas.
All of Biden’s initial nominees — including Mayorkas, Antony Blinken for secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan for national security adviser — had highpowered roles in the last Democratic administration.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) slammed the group in a tweet as “orderly caretakers of America’s decline.”
“I support American greatness,” Rubio added.
“And I have no interest in returning to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.”
All three senators are jockeying for position in the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination race, a PoliticoMorning Consult poll found last week, but far behind President Trump, who retains the support of a majority of Republicans.
A series of Senate-nomination fights will give the hopefuls a tempting stage, The Hill reported.
“What they’re doing right now is picking their niche issues,” GOP strategist Ryan James Gidursky told The Post.
“The issue that Josh Hawley is the most Trump-y on is Big Tech issues, so he’s speaking about that,” Gidursky said. “For Tom Cotton, it’s immigration.”
Cotton’s criticism of Mayorkas centered on his involvement in a 2012 scheme to give green cards to politically connected Chinese nationals that was criticized by the DHS inspector general in 2015. “That is disqualifying to lead the Department of Homeland Security,” Cotton said.
Hawley singled out Blinken, who has “backed every endless war since the Iraq invasion,” the senator tweeted. “Now he works for #BigTech and helps companies break into #China.”
“They all have reasonable concerns,” Gidursky said.
But while the US Constitution provides that the Senate must give its “advice and consent” to a president’s top nominees, legislators traditionally give great leeway to the incoming commander-in-chief, even when the executive branch is in the opposing party’s hands.
“If they were serious about trying to defeat one of these nominations, they would pick one and all focus around it,” Gidursky said.
Additional reporting by Jon Levine