If Democrats cannot do a better job of highlighting how unqualified a nominee like Pete Hegseth is, and if Republicans cannot muster the courage to reject someone like him, we might as well just do away with this “advice and consent” farce.
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If Tuesday’s confirmation hearing of Fox News personality Pete Hegseth is any indication, then the coming weeks will usher in a new era when it comes to the pointlessness of these charades. This is not only owed to the increasing partisan divide in the Senate and the compulsion of lawmakers to perform for the cameras instead of doing their jobs, but also the unique unsuitability of many of Donald Trump’s nominees.
In recent years, confirmation hearings have devolved into a bit of a circus. Instead of providing an opportunity for senators to vet the nominees before confirming them, they now primarily allow everybody involved to “win the news cycle” by shoehorning as many talking points as possible into pre-written questions and rehearsed answers.
And, when the nominee is someone capable, there is little harm in that.
This year, however, Trump has nominated so many uniquely unqualified people that the hearings could, in theory, have real value.
That’s if any Republican senators had any backbone left and if Democrats were better at asking questions.
Take Hegseth and the position he is nominated for: secretary of defense.
There are any number of reasons why he should not get that job. Democrats know this, and, presumably, so does the dwindling contingent of sane Republicans.
And it’s not (necessarily) because of how he feels about people who may have committed war crimes (pretty good), or settling sexual assault allegations (also quite positively), or cheating on his spouse(s).
That’s not to be dismissive of these things, since they attest to Hegseth’s character, but there are a lot of scummy people in government… including his future boss, who has done much worse.
Then there are his views on “warfighters,” as he likes to call them. The TV personality believes they should be non-woke males.
Still, even those are not the main red flags since his views probably align with those of many Republicans.
In the context of the job that he is supposed to be doing, there are much greater problems.
Like the drinking or the lack of management experience. Those aren’t the qualities you look for in someone who is overseeing nearly 3 million people and a budget of $800 billion… or someone whose decisions could mean the difference between life and death.
Or Hegseth’s religious views, which could most charitably be described as Christian nationalist-adjacent.
And, guess what, even those are not the most disqualifying aspects of this nominee.
That dubious honor goes to the fact that he seems to be willing to violate various international treaties (and perhaps the Constitution) if Trump commands.
During the hearing he waffled on the latter, saying that he would not want to “get ahead” of conversations he may be having with the president with regard to using the US military domestically. Those conversations should be pretty short.
Trump: “Hey Pete, I want you to deploy the military domestically to take care of these protesters and then deport some Hondurans.”
Hegseth: “I don’t think so.”
The nominee was also non-committal when it came to whether the US should follow the Geneva Conventions, the gold standard governing how to fight wars, e.g., by not torturing prisoners. The US already has a pretty poor record when it comes to abiding by the treaty, but Hegseth made it sound as though he would be happy to take things a step further.
“We follow rules, but we don’t need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars,” Hegseth stated in one exchange.
“What an ‘America First’ national security policy is not going to do is hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield,” he added a bit later.
Speaking of international bodies, Hegseth was also cagey when it came to attacking Greenland, a US ally and NATO member.
The fact that this even came up is absurd, but Trump, and therefore also most Republicans, has developed a real obsession with territorial expansion, e.g., by taking over Greenland.
Hegseth did not want to speculate as to whether he would object to invading an ally. Instead, he praised Trump for “never strategically tipping his hand.”
Just for comparison’s sake, the US military outnumbers all of Greenland 50-1, so the challenge of an invasion would probably not be strategy.
And this is one of the issues on which Democrats failed to highlight just how bonkers Trump is.
For example, they could have just asked Hegseth what Article 5 of the NATO treaty says. For those who don’t know, that is the provision that states that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on them all.
A logical follow-up question would then have been whether Greenland is protected by Article 5, and whether that means the other countries, including nuclear powers Great Britain and France, would have to come to its aid.
Because while Americans may not care a ton about how woke their military is, the thought of going to war with not one but two nuclear powers (as well of most of the US’s traditional allies) should give them pause.
By the way, what is more troubling than Democrats not highlighting that Hegseth seems unwilling to prevent Trump from doing really bad, really illegal, and really unconstitutional things is that Republicans are not putting a stop to this.
They know exactly what he is, but they are so subservient to the incoming president that they are just going to confirm his terrible nominees.
If Hegseth gets confirmed, and he will be, then there is really no point in holding another one of these hearings.
However, we should also not forget that, by their act of rubberstamping Trump’s picks, Republican senators have become complicit in every bad decision one of these nominees makes.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
