Pete Hegseth’s confirmation vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee is shaping up to be the first in the past four administrations not to have bipartisan support from the committee.
“The Senate’s reputation is at stake,” Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the committee, told reporters.
Reed, along with his Democratic colleagues, grilled Hegseth over his views on women’s roles in combat, his extramarital affairs, sexual assault allegations, possible conflicts of interest and whether he would follow unlawful orders from President-elect Donald Trump. They attempted to reveal gaps in his knowledge of international security and asked directly about allegations of alcohol abuse.
They began and ended the hearing unsatisfied with his nomination.
“I have voted favorably for all of your predecessors, including those in the first Trump administration,” Reed told Hegseth in his opening remarks during the confirmation hearing. “Unfortunately, you lack the character, composure and competence to serve as secretary of defense.”
By the end, there weren’t any Democrats on the committee who seemed prepared to offer their vote in support of Hegseth. After the hearing, Reed expressed hope that not all Republicans are on board with his nomination.
“I believe the jury is still out. I encourage my Republican colleagues to carefully examine the facts,” he said.
Republicans on the committee, however, showed overwhelming support for Hegseth — including Sen. Joni Ernst, who was once seen as a pivotal vote. Sen. Mike Rounds signaled that Republicans on the committee will fall in line with Trump.
“The fact that the president does deserve to have his choice as the nominee is really important to us, and unless there is a real good reason expressed for not supporting the president, we should go with what the president is requesting for his cabinet choices,” Rounds told NOTUS. He also told reporters he was confident Hegseth clinched the confirmation, a sentiment Trump’s orbit echoed.
“Hegseth deflated the Democrats. He really set the tone for the rest of the nominees,” a source close to Trump told NOTUS.
Republicans on the committee are already counting out Democrats.
“Clearly, they’re not going to vote for him, but I think the most important audience was the American people. They have to be impressed,” Sen. Roger Wicker, the Armed Services committee chairman, told reporters.
Rounds and Wicker both crossed the aisle in 2021 and voted to confirm Lloyd Austin as the then-defense secretary. Likewise, several of the Democrats who grilled Hegseth at Tuesday’s hearing voted to confirm Mark Esper as defense secretary in 2019. Defense nominees spanning decades have been confirmed with overwhelming bipartisan support. That looks very likely to change with Hegseth.
Reed is the only Democrat on the committee who Hegseth met with before the hearing, a fact that many of them brought up.
“I have voted in a bipartisan way for secretaries of defense. I voted for two secretaries of defense when Donald Trump was previously president,” Sen. Gary Peters — who told NOTUS last week that Hegseth hadn’t met with him — started off saying. “But part of that was the process of having an opportunity to get to know the person and understand their qualifications and understand the standards.”
“Was there a reason you were afraid to have one-on-one meetings with some of my colleagues before the hearing?” he asked.
“Senator, I know there was a great deal of outreach, multiple offices, schedules get full. A lot going on. I welcome the opportunity, pending my schedule, to have an opportunity to sit down,” Hegseth responded.
Without the opportunity for a private conversation, many Democrats were asking Hegseth their most contentious questions for the first time at the hearing.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin asked if Hegseth thought there was “such a thing as an illegal order” that Trump or any other president could give — a question he did not want to engage with, repeatedly saying he disagreed with the premise.
“I wanted him to say more clearly than he did, that if he was given an order that was not constitutional, he’d push back, just like Secretary Esper,” Slotkin later told NOTUS. “I’m literally worried about, in the dead of night, if President Trump asked him to do something that will literally, in an irreversible way take the military, that he’s not going to have the backbone to stop it.”
Armed Services Democrats said they ultimately didn’t hear enough from Hegseth to assuage their concerns. Specifically, they pointed to his refusal to directly address the many allegations against him — ranging from abusing alcohol at work events to taking his staff members to strip clubs. Hegseth called them “anonymous smears,” blaming the media.
“He’s wrong. I’ve seen names attached to all of these. Some of them are things that I’ve seen in the skiff where I can’t make the decision to disclose them. But I mean, look at what he’s said, look at what he’s written,” Sen. Tim Kaine said.
Others expressed serious concern with Hegseth’s public writing — including the part of his book where he openly asks if U.S. troops “should follow the Geneva Conventions.” Hegseth previously lobbied during the first Trump administration for pardons on behalf of two Navy SEALs who were convicted of war crimes.“As someone who’s led men in combat directly and had to make very difficult decisions,” Hegseth said at the hearing, “I thought very deeply about the balance between legality and lethality.”
Hegseth said he “wasn’t talking about disavowing the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions or the Uniform Code of Military Justice” but that he did have concerns regarding “restrictive rules of engagement,” saying that the Department of Defense lacked “men and women with dust on their boots, not the second-guessers, in air-conditioned offices in Washington, D.C.”
The committee could vote on Hegseth’s nomination early next week, Rounds told NOTUS.
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John T. Seward and Shifra Dayak are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.