A prominent Republican US senator pledged on Sunday that Congress would not give blanket approval to Donald Trump’s controversial cabinet picks ahead of the congressional confirmation process, as a leading Democrat challenged the qualifications of some of them to serve.
Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma predicted lawmakers in the upper chamber would have tough questions in particular for the former Democratic congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard, who was chosen by the president-elect as director of national security for his second administration.
When asked on CNN on Sunday morning if he will vote for all of Trump’s cabinet nominations, Lankford did not answer directly, pointing to the Senate process of holding public hearings for nominees, beginning on 3 January, ahead of Trump’s confirmation on 20 January.
“Everyone is going to get a fair shake,” he said of the president-elect’s list of preferred nominees.
Gabbard faces a potentially rough ride during her Senate confirmation over a number of questionable incidents from her career. These include spreading Russian propaganda over the war in Ukraine, prompting critics to ask if she might be a “Russian asset”, as well as her making a clandestine visit to Syria to meet the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, who has been accused of war crimes, a trip that drew Republican criticism as a shame and a disgrace.
“We’ll have lots of questions,” Lankford, the newly-elected vice-chair of the Senate policy committee, told CNN’s State of the Union show.
“She met with Bashar al-Assad, we’ll want to know what the purpose was and what the direction for that was as a member of Congress. We want to get a chance to talk about past comments she’s made, and get them into full context.”
He added: “So, sure, there’s comments that are floating out there, but we want to be able to know the rest of the story.”
Lankford’s comments came at the end of a week that saw Trump’s first pick for attorney general, the Florida former congressman Matt Gaetz, fall amid sexual misconduct allegations that prompted pushback from a number of Republican senators and made it unlikely he would win enough votes for confirmation by the incoming-Republican majority.
Other Trump choices under scrutiny include the Fox TV host Pete Hegseth, the nominee for defense secretary who was the subject of a sexual assault investigation in 2017, and Robert F Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic tapped for health secretary.
Lankford also suggested that Pam Bondi, Florida’s former attorney general chosen by the president-elect this week in place of Gaetz, should put aside her promise to seek legal retribution on Trump’s political foes, if she is confirmed.
Of the role, Lankford said: “It’s America’s lawyer. It’s not the president’s lawyer. It is very important that we get this role right, and that they’re actually focused on diminishing crime in America.”
As well as open hearings, Lankford said of Trump’s nominees: “We’ll sit down with them in our offices, we’ll get a chance to be able to talk.”
The Democratic Illinois senator and combat veteran Tammy Duckworth, meanwhile, told CNN’s State of the Union that Hegseth and Gabbard were both unqualified or unsuitable for the roles Trump wants them to fill.
“He never commanded a unit, he never commanded a company, let alone battalions, brigades or whole armies. He was a platoon leader,” Duckworth said of Hegseth, a retired major in the army national guard.
“He served at a very low level in the military, and we’re talking about an organization of 3 million servicemen, servicewomen and civilians, and a budget of over $900bn. He does not have the experience to run an organization of that size.”
Duckworth also vehemently disagreed with Hegseth’s opposition to allowing women to stay in combat roles, after a long-fought battle for greater equality in the US military. She added she was “troubled” by claims Gabbard was a Russian asset.
“We have a real deep concern whether or not she’s a compromised person. The US intelligence community has identified her as having troubling relationships with America’s foes, and my worry is that she couldn’t pass a background check,” she said.
Oklahoma’s other Republican senator, Markwayne Mullin, a vocal Trump ally, also appeared on State of the Union and gave his unqualified backing to all of the president-elect’s picks.
“The president has done this job before. He knows exactly what he needs. He knows who he wants to put in those positions,” he said.
“That’s why he’s been able to move fast, because he knows he has four years to reach the mandate the American people said they want, the government going in a different direction. These nominations are going to deliver that for him.”
Meanwhile, the Republican US senator Rand Paul said he opposed Trump’s preference to use the armed forces if needed to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants from the US.
The president-elect said last Monday that his new administration would declare a national emergency and use the US military for that purpose.
Paul told CBS’s Face the Nation: “You don’t do it with the army because it’s illegal. If they send the army into New York and you have 10,000 troops marching carrying semi-automatic weapons, I think it’s a terrible image, and I will oppose that.” Federal troops are prohibited by law from being deployed for US domestic law enforcement, except when authorized by Congress.
