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Ambitious Republicans in the Senate are taking photos of President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet choices – setting the stage for deadly confirmation battles in the early days of the new administration.
“What a bunch of corporate and war devotees – and #BigTech to sell,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) snarked on Twitter this week, after Biden presented his choices for diplomatic and security posts.
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, an influential member of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees, piled up.
“It sounds a lot like a comeback of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, and that foreign policy has had dire consequences for our nation,” Cotton told Fox News on Wednesday, naming Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a particular target.
All of Biden’s original candidates – including Mayorkas, Antony Blinken for secretary of state and Jake Sullivan for White House national security adviser – had prominent roles in the last Democratic administration.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) slammed the group as “orderly guardians of America’s decline” in a fiery tweet.
“I support American greatness,” Rubio added. “And I have no interest in going back to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.”
The three senators are already vying for a position in the 2024 GOP presidential nomination race, a Politico / Morning Consult poll found last week – but far behind President Trump, who retains the support of a majority of Republicans.
Still, a spate of Senate nomination fights will give hopes 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 Josh Hawley is most Trump-y on is the big tech issues, so he’s talking about it,” Gidursky said. “For Tom Cotton, it’s immigration.”
Cotton’s criticism of Mayorkas centered on his involvement in a 2012 program to give green cards to politically linked Chinese nationals that was criticized by the DHS Inspector General in 2015. “It’s disqualifying to lead the department internal security ”, Cotton said.
Hawley singled out Blinken, who has “supported every endless war since the invasion of Iraq,” the senator tweeted. “Now he works for #BigTech and helps companies enter #China.”
“They all have reasonable concerns,” Gidursky said.
But while the U.S. Constitution states that the Senate must “give its opinion and consent” to a president’s top candidates, lawmakers traditionally leave a lot of leeway to the new commander-in-chief – even when executive power is between hands of the opposing party.
“The Senate really never beats someone unless they have a big problem,” Gidursky said.
“If they were serious about trying to defeat any of these nominations, they would pick one and everyone would focus around it,” he added. “The fact that they divide their attention makes it seem like they’re only tackling niche issues at the grassroots.”
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