Cabinet Confirmations - Week 3 & 4

It’s officially been a full month of Cabinet confirmations and we still have four more nominees yet to be confirmed. This gumming up of the works can be thanked to the Democrats stonewalling of Trump nominees starting with Russell Vought on February 6th. Sadly, it was a stone wall that only held for one week.

For reasons unclear to me, Democrats ended their mass refusal to confirm nominees with the new USDA head, Brooke Rollins. This decision is exceptionally baffling, simply considering that Rollins hasn’t been involved in agriculture since 1994 when she got her undergrad degree. After this, she switched to the world of law & politics and has stayed there ever since. Not to mention, she co-founded and led the America First Policy Institute, which exists to write up the laws that would make Project 2025 a reality. Nineteen Democratic Senators felt that this kind of bio was worth a yay vote.

That said, it seems like the blow-back was pretty immediate, because the next week Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was on the receiving end of a united nay-voting Democrat caucus. SBA nominee Kelly Loeffler came close to getting the same treatment, but Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen broke ranks and voted for her.

Which leads us to which Democratic Senators have been most likely to support Trump’s nominees. After the last fortnight of mostly unified voting, only four Senators have voted for half or more of Trump’s nominees:

• John Fetterman (PA) has voted yay for 9 of 15 nominees (he missed 3 votes), or 60%

• Ruben Gallego (AZ), Maggie Hassan (NH), and Jeanne Shaheen (NH) have voted yay for 9 of 18 nominees, or 50%

Not going to lie, it is nice to see the party (mostly) holding on nay votes. The Rollins vote did indicate to me that they really would rather not, but whether it was bullying by constituents, moral reevaluation, or foolish shock at being lied to by previous nominees, I’m glad things appear to be back on track.