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Since Election Day, Democrats have rightly been in something of a funk. They sauntered into November expecting Kamala Harris would hold the White House for the party, the House might tip their way, and they even dared to dream about keeping a majority in the Senate.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Then, votes were counted.
Americans decided to send Donald Trump back to Washington for another four years. The House stayed red by the smallest of margins. And Republicans picked up a majority in the Senate, along with the gavels to run the day-to-day operations of that chamber and to staff the incoming Administration’s Cabinet. Democrats’ billion-dollar cash spigot turned out to be insufficient given the moment and no one—no party elder, no vanguard up-and-comer, no donor with any devil-may-care confidence—could say how exactly the Democrats could burn off the fog that left them limping without a clear read of the landscape.
Next week, Democrats will get their first real, meaningful chance to chart a new way forward. The Senate is set to hold its first hearings on Trump’s picks for top jobs in his Administration-in-Waiting.
Already, there are signs that Democrats will use those confirmation hearings to rough up some of the nominees on their qualifications and Trump’s plans alike. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, gave the first tangible signal of a strategic opposition in a series of questions she sent this week to Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host who is Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, and whose confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee is scheduled for Tuesday.
Democrats say Warren’s fact-based interrogation is a viable model for their approach to nominees like Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Trump’s nominees to be Director of National Intelligence and the nation’s top health official, respectively. While Democrats don’t expect to derail the incoming Cabinet en masse, they do have reasonable expectations that they could ding a few sufficiently enough that Trump rethinks if they’re worth defending. (That approach already cost Matt Gaetz his shot at becoming Attorney General as questions about his relationships with drugs, alcohol, and teenagers piled up.)
Trump had initially hoped that his Cabinet would be ready for his first day in office, a big splash that would show he’s hitting the ground running. But as he prepared for Wednesday’s meeting with his Senate allies down at his Florida club, his team had the unfortunate duty of telling him that his raft of picks was not going to be in place when the clock struck noon on Jan. 20. Trump was none too pleased, but Senate GOP staffers were ready with their own complaints: Trump dithered on submitting his nominees to the traditional FBI background checks for almost a month and most of his picks have not turned in all their paperwork. Most Republicans leading the committees that are considering the nominations are not eager to have hearings for nominees who have submitted only partial responses and just-trust-me assurances.
Some of Trump’s loyalists in the Senate suggested during a private luncheon this week that maybe it was worth moving forward on nominees even before their paperwork had arrived. That could speed up the process for the likes of Gabbard, a former Democratic House member, and Pam Bondi, a former Florida Attorney General looking to take on the role at the national level. Similarly, former wrestling executive Linda McMahon is still pulling together her files but insists they’re almost ready for the Education Department nominee.
In fact, just a few of Trump’s picks are primed to move into their new jobs on Day One: Sen. Marco Rubio’s dossier to become Secretary of State; Rep. Elise Stefanik for the U.N. Ambassador gig; and former Rep. John Ratcliffe to helm the CIA. Other than that, nominees are still missing pieces of the file or are waiting on dates to be confirmed for hearings—a headache for Trump’s quest to have a turn-key Cabinet ready and an opportunity for Democrats to have more time to kick the tires.
Which is why Democrats are looking at these hearings as a first test of how unified they can stand as a check against Trump and his governing trifecta of the White House, Senate, and House. Democrats on their own cannot really block the nominations if Republicans hold the line—and to this point that seems like a safe bet—but they can, at the very least, start to chip away at the idea that the GOP has a mandate. While some of the nominees fall far afield from the norms—Hegseth, Gabbard, and RFK Jr. are the marquee names in that cohort, for sure—the bulk will face only nominal opposition from Democrats. The question for them is a simple one: do they rough them all up, or do they reserve their outrage for the truly exceptional picks? So far, it seems like the latter as evidenced in Warren’s first show. That strategic choice may feel hollow as MAGA-fied nominees for other positions go by with minimal friction, but it keeps the heat on the big names that may prove memorable for voters two years from now in the midterms.
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