Sen. Markwayne Mullin received a chilly welcome from the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday as he began the first steps of seeking congressional approval to replace Kristi Noem as head of DHS.
That was primarily due to his botched handling of bad blood between himself and the committee’s chairman, Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who often breaks with his own party along libertarian ideological lines. The two have publicly feuded ever since Mullin offered sympathetic remarks to a neighbor who savagely beat Paul at his home in 2017, causing serious injuries.
