Senate shouldn’t flinch in vetting nominees

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Minnesota native Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay before becoming famous on Fox News, said in his opening statement to members of the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing that if confirmed he would bring a “warrior culture” to the Pentagon.

But first he has to face a Senate culture that by constitutional design won’t back down from a fight either, as evidenced by several senators bluntly asking about allegations involving his personal and professional life as well as his controversial comments about women in combat and other military matters, including advocating for three men who were accused or convicted of war crimes.

Some particularly partisan lawmakers and commentators were quick to question the questioning. But it’s essential the Senate thoughtfully and thoroughly vet nominees — especially ones tasked with the government’s most fundamental responsibility: national security.

That’s the way the nation’s founders intended by creating checks and balances in the federal government, including the U.S. Senate’s role in confirming key cabinet nominees.

“All of these are an important part of the Senate constitutional responsibility to provide advice, and if they deem, consent to the president’s nominees,” said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Reynolds, whose scholarship focuses on Congress, recalled that while this role is constitutional and traditional, Trump floated the possibility of flouting it by bypassing the Senate through recess appointments.

That wouldn’t sit with Democratic senators like Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, who told me when Trump began to announce his selections that “the confirmation of nominees is one of the most important responsibilities we have, and it’s a big part of our system of checks and balances.” It’s crucial, Klobuchar said, that candidates are evaluated “in a normal fashion, which is to say: Is this someone who’s qualified to do their work, and are they going to live up to the expectations of running that department?”

And the Pentagon isn’t just any department, but an entity with an $840 billion budget that employs 3.4 million service members and civil servants and faces a geopolitical landscape in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, East Asia and beyond that’s as fraught as any in generations. One in which we are unprepared to fight a “great-power war,” according to Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center for Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who told me when Hegseth was nominated that the U.S. “confronts the most daunting geostrategic environment right now that we’ve seen since 1945 — and that view is consistent with the explicit assessment and conclusion of the bipartisan, congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy commission.”

The responsibility — and privilege — of serving as secretary of defense at such a pivotal time requires the right nominee, and senators are right to ask the tough questions to ensure the selection is sound — just as they should with other nominees, many of whom come to confirmation hearings with personal, professional and political controversies of their own.

Indeed, several selected by Trump “are really, in some important ways, in terms of their past positions and their records, just different than folks who we would have seen nominated” in previous presidential administrations regardless of party, said Reynolds.

People like Tulsi Gabbard, nominated as director of national intelligence, who in 2017 met with then Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose homicidal reign was well documented by then. Or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose vaccine skepticism and other unconventional views may present a direct threat to the health of the citizens he would be tasked to protect. In fact, all cabinet nominees need scrutiny, just as previous presidents’ picks did.

“We should see senators of both parties ask direct and challenging questions of the nominees,” said Reynolds.

But based on the first day of the Hegseth hearings, direct and challenging questions are left to Democratic senators while Republicans deflected and defended.

That’s in part because of partisan reasons, of course. But it also reflects an ever-evolving media environment that’s dramatically different every four or especially eight years when new nominees face confirmation.

“There’s a lot of incentive to ask a question that is going to become a viral video clip or perhaps the answer from the nominee is going to become viral,” said Reynolds.

What should go viral isn’t a “gotcha” question, but a “can-you” one, like Klobuchar’s fundamental question: “Is this someone who’s qualified to do their work, and are they going to live up to the expectations of running that department?”