Grilling begins for Trump’s cabinet choices
President-elect confident despite ‘challenges’
THE US Senate was to begin confirmation hearings for key nominees to Donald Trump’s cabinet yesterday, amid concerns that many of the president-elect’s choices had not been fully vetted over ethics, or made full financial disclosures.
Ten days before Trump takes the oath of office, senior politicians were to hold hearings for Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for US attorney-general, and retired marine general John Kelly, his choice for homeland security secretary.
Several nominees are scheduled to have hearings this week, with three due to get under way today, including Rex Tillerson, the wealthy Exxon oilman who Trump has tapped for secretary of state.
Unlike Sessions, who has faced negative reaction from Senate Democrats, Kelly by most accounts has been amicably received during several days of private meetings with Democratic and Republican members of the Homeland Security Committee.
Trump has shown no sign of worry over the reception his nominees would get on Capitol Hill.
“Confirmation is going great,” he told reporters on Monday in an unexpected appearance in the lobby of Trump Tower, headquarters for his gilded corporate offices in New York City. “I think they’ll all pass.”
Democrats however are vowing not to allow Congress to rubberstamp Trump’s cabinet choices without a fight.
Sessions, in particular, has drawn fierce opposition from liberals concerned over his conservative views on everything from abortion rights to civil liberties.
“He has denounced Roe v Wade, which guarantees a woman’s right to choose. And on other issues like religious freedoms, torture . . . he’s taken positions I think are out of the mainstream, and of course his staunch and steadfast opposition to any kind of immigration reform,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Judiciary Committee, told MSNBC on Monday.
Another Democratic senator, Cory Booker, went so far as to say he would testify against Sessions at today’s hearing – a departure from many decades of Senate protocol.
“I’m breaking a pretty long Senate tradition,” Booker told MSNBC, adding that Sessions had “a posture and a positioning that I think represent a real danger to our country”.
Blumenthal said one measure of whether an attorney-general nominee was right for the job was whether that person was willing to stand up to the president in the interests of justice.
“Our constitutional duty is to make a choice about whether this individual will be a champion of constitutional rights and liberties and will be able to stand up to Donald Trump, soon to be president, and say, ‘you cannot do what you need to do’, or ‘we’re going to have to indict someone who is a friend of yours’, and sometimes there will be conflicts of interest where an independent counsel will have to be appointed,” Blumenthal said.
Meanwhile, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer said members of the Republican-controlled chamber had crammed the schedule full of hearings, making the vetting more challenging than usual.
Many of Trump’s nominees posed especially thorny conflictof-interest challenges, he added.
“They come, many of them, from enormous wealth. Many have vast holdings in stocks and very few have experience in government. So they have not been appropriately vetted for something like a cabinet post before.
“What had been standard practice for the vast majority of nominees – the completion of a preliminary ethics review before their nomination – was skipped over for the vast majority of . . . Trump’s nominees,” the New York democrat said. – AFP