Hegseth in the hornet’s nest

Pete Hegseth was the first cabinet nominee to the breach, leading Donald Trump’s collection of outsiders, populists and hellraisers into the Capitol Hill combat they can all expect to navigate in the coming weeks. And in terms of a first confrontation with the opponent, Hegseth handled his mission manfully — taking the slings and arrows from the Democratic side of the aisle with relative ease. At one point, exasperated Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal — you’ll remember him from not serving in Vietnam and falsely claiming that he did — said, “I don’t dispute your communication skills.” And how could he? Hegseth seemed more than ready to address the accusations from Senate Democrats head on, and the Republicans on the committee seemed unperturbed by their attacks.

For those unfamiliar with Senate hearings like this, the Democrats were shockingly disorganized and spastic. The aim of hearings like this should not be grandstanding or shaking a fist at the nominee — it should be a focused, organized attempt to undermine them and create more questions around their record, questions designed to lead to Republican follow-up that begs more research, delay and investigation. For comparison, recall how Democrats achieved this, albeit briefly, with a canny manipulation of Senator Jeff Flake during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. But today, rather than hammer away at one particular point of emphasis designed to pull at the potential gap between Hegseth and someone like Joni Ernst, Senate Democrats were flailing, leveling scattershot attacks that seemed more like partisan talking points than an actual case.

Before the hearing began, the staff-level spin to Punchbowl was that the more partisan Democratic women on the committee — Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, Mazie Hirono, Jeanne Shaheen, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jacky Rosen and Elissa Slotkin — would be focused on allegations about Hegseth’s behavior and his opposition to women in combat. But Warren tried to make it about hypocrisy, saying that Hegseth’s opposition to generals going through a revolving door from government service into the military industrial complex was a bad thing was a rule he wouldn’t follow himself. “I’m not a general,” Hegseth responded, to laughter from those in the committee room — and Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama jokingly addressed him as a “general” when the time shifted to him. The moment for any point-scoring was lost.

The questioning from Duckworth and Hirono was no better. Duckworth demanded to know what organizations Hegseth had audited, as if the Pentagon’s inability to sustain an audit is something that would require him to don a green eyeshade himself, then demanded he name the members of ASEAN, who she described as part of potential negotiated military agreements. The only problem: ASEAN is an economic trade alliance, having nothing to do with the SecDef job. And then Hirono, displaying her IQ, asked a series of questions about obeying unlawful orders — to seize Greenland or the Panama Canal by force, to get drunk on the job, to shoot protesters in the legs — and yelled whenever Hegseth began to answer that he would do exactly the thing she claimed.

The only senators who seemed to stick to the line of predetermined questioning were Shaheen and Gillibrand, who blasted Hegseth for comments about women in combat and suggested he was denigrating their service or waffling on the issue in front of the committee. This is the only real line of attack — that Hegseth is a Neanderthal, an anti-woman figure at the moment when almost a fifth of the US military is female — that is consistent with what Democratic staffers had intimated before the hearing. When you have such a big gap between the questions staffers said their member would ask and the questions they actually asked, something went wrong in hearing prep.

As responses go, few can rival that of Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, who unleashed on his fellow members of the Senate in a way rarely seen in public:

I’m just making a point because there’s a lot about qualifications, and I think it is so hypocritical of senators, especially on the other side of the aisle, to be talking about his qualifications — not going to be the Secretary of Defense — and yet your qualifications aren’t any better. You guys aren’t any more qualified to be a senator than I am, except we are lucky enough to be here.

Let me read what the secretary of defense is, because I Googled it. Really, it is hard to see, but in general, the US secretary of defense position is “filled by a civilian.” That’s it. If you have served in the US Armed Forces and have been in the service, you have to be retired for at least seven years, and Congress can waive that.

And then there’s the question that the senator from Massachusetts brought up about serving on a board inside the military industry, and yet your own secretary, who you all voted for — Secretary Austin — we had to put a waiver on because he stepped off the board of Raytheon. But I guess that is OK because that is a Democrat secretary of defense. But we so quickly forget about that.

Can Senator Kaine — or I guess I better use “the senator from Virginia” — start bringing up the fact that, what if he showed up drunk to your job? How many senators have shown up drunk to vote at night?

Have any of you guys asked them to step down or resign from their job? And don’ t tell me you haven’ t seen it, because I know you have. And how many senators do you know who have gotten a divorce for cheating on their wives? Did you ask them to step down? No? It is for show. Make sure you make a big show and point out the hypocrisy because a man has made a mistake. And you want to sit there and say that he is not qualified? Give me a joke [sic]. It is so ridiculous that you guys hold yourselves to this higher standard and you forget you’ve got a big plank in your own eyes.

If the worst Democrats can offer as opposition is the scene that played out in the Senate Armed Services Committee today, the Trump cabinet slate is likely to be confirmed en masse, Hegseth included.