When President Joe Biden took office, Republican senators didn’t do Democrats any favors. Now, some of those same senators want different treatment: They want full sign off on Donald Trump’s nominees.
“Let him have their own team,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville told NOTUS. “It’s like a head coach. If you can’t get your own coaches to work with you, it’s gonna be hard.”
Many Republicans — actually, almost half the conference — rejected Biden’s initial wave of nominees four years ago. Two dozen GOP senators opposed 10 or more of Biden’s nominees. Ten of those voted against more than half the cabinet.
Tuberville opposed 15 nominees, including a couple that a majority of GOP senators voted to confirm: Gina Raimondo and Cecilia Rouse. He went on to put up a blockade on military promotions that was so severe it slowed down the work of the entire Senate. Tuberville pointed out that he voted to confirm Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — though that was partially because Austin was an Auburn man.
NOTUS suggested to Tuberville that he had cut down a lot of Biden’s “coaches.”
“Yep,” he said.
Every GOP senator NOTUS spoke with was understandably less than concerned about whether Democrats would support Trump’s picks. Republicans have the majority, after all. But some were frustrated with how overtly partisan the cabinet nomination process has become, even as they acknowledged their own role in getting here.
“Well they should, but they won’t,” Sen. John Kennedy told NOTUS when asked if Democratic senators should be deferential to Trump’s nominees.
Should Democrats show the same deference Republicans gave to Biden’s nominees? Meaning, not much?
“I don’t think we kicked too hard on President Biden’s nominees,” Kennedy, who opposed 12 of Biden’s cabinet picks, said. “My job is to ask hard questions and to expect good answers. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but that’s my approach.”
Sen. Ted Cruz helped lead the charge against Biden’s nominees. He opposed confirmation of 18 of them, including some who carried broad Republican support, like Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
Recently, during a segment with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Cruz lambasted the media for questioning why Republicans would vote for Trump’s nominees. When asked about opposing so many of Biden’s nominees, Cruz deflected.
“Yeah, but look, I mean a lot of Biden’s picks, I think, were extreme,” Cruz said to Collins, pointing to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “I was surprised Biden did not nominate more moderate candidates. You look at Trump. Trump’s nominated several people who were Democrats until like 12 minutes ago.”
In conversations with over a dozen of the GOP senators who most often opposed Biden’s cabinet nominees, there wasn’t a consensus on how the minority party should respond to the president-elect’s preferred team. But there was some recognition of the current political climate.
Cruz told NOTUS he expects Democratic senators to vote against “virtually every Trump nominee.”
“They’ll pick a couple,” he said, mentioning fellow Sen. Marco Rubio. “But for anything remotely controversial, I would be astonished if it were not a straight party-line vote by Democrats against the nomination.”
Did he understand that decision, considering his own opposition to Biden’s picks?
“Listen, it varies,” Cruz said. “I’d be willing to bet there will be more Republican votes against Republican nominees than there were Democrat votes against Biden nominees when he became president. The Democrats voted for everyone party line.”
Not all the senators NOTUS spoke with so easily embraced hypocrisy. Multiple, like Sen. James Lankford, brought up their votes against Biden’s nominees unprompted like a verbal shrug: Well, we did it, too.
“There’ll be a lot of disagreement on the Democrat side,” Lankford said. “We had a lot of disagreement with Biden’s picks.”
Sen. Rick Scott was also understanding of why, in all likelihood, Democratic senators won’t sprint to the Senate floor with a thumbs up.
“They have the opportunity to decide on their own. I mean, there were some Biden nominees I supported,” Scott told NOTUS. “Some nominees I didn’t support.”
The idea that their Democratic counterparts would be partial to the picks of Trump was laughable to many.
“That would be a ‘eureka’ moment or something” if Democratic senators supported Trump’s nominees, departing Sen. Mike Braun told NOTUS. “If I see that happening, I’d say, ‘Gosh, something has really changed.’”
“It’s both ways,” Braun, who opposed 12 of Biden’s picks, added. “That’s why I’d be surprised if I all of a sudden saw them being deferential first.”
Cabinet confirmations weren’t always a prolonged partisan endeavor. Since George W. Bush’s election, the timeline for cabinet confirmations has lengthened substantially.
“If you go back 30 years ago, that was different than it is today,” Lankford said. “Thirty years ago, it was very common for a bipartisan, ‘Yep, they meet the minimum’ test.”
Democratic senators have so far held their confirmation cards close to the vest. It’s a departure from Trump’s first term, when his shock victory brought about vocal and persistent pushback against his every move from congressional Democrats.
That was especially true for his cabinet picks. Though Democrats didn’t have the votes to defeat his nominees — Republicans held a 52-48 majority — they did their best to make the confirmations the Senate version of nails scraping a chalkboard, particularly for the picks they considered controversial, like former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and Steve Mnuchin.
Trump eventually got his cabinet, but it wasn’t without a fight. Several, actually.
Republican senators aren’t expecting Democratic votes this go-round, either. But the split over whether presidents should be entitled to their nominees goes to show cabinet picks are increasingly a partisan problem.
Democratic senators are meeting with Trump’s cabinet nominees. Sen. John Fetterman already met with secretary of defense pick Pete Hegseth and UN ambassador nominee Elise Stefanik.
Scott said he encouraged Trump’s picks to sit down with those across the aisle, and said each had been receptive to the suggestion. Such meetings were essential to the few Biden nominees Scott voted to confirm.
“It made a difference if they didn’t talk to us,” Scott said.
Democratic senators will inevitably vote ‘no’ on at least some of Trump’s nominees. When they do, they’ll have a key GOP ally: Sen. Josh Hawley, who voted against 19 of Biden’s.
“My request to them is that they would keep an open mind and that they wouldn’t hold up the process,” Hawley told NOTUS. “If they want to vote ‘no,’ that’s fine. I voted ‘no.’”
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Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.