Republicans gear up for intraparty confirmation battles

It’s a big week for President Donald Trump’s nominations. The three most contentious remaining — former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) for director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services, and Kash Patel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation — are all currently scheduled for Thursday morning. GOP infighting already threatens Gabbard and RFK, but Democrats are hoping to tank Patel — and will turn the heat up on Republicans as high as they can to get there. And their chosen weak point will almost certainly be the January 6 pardons.

The reality of Gabbard’s nomination is that the threat
isn’t from the Democrats as much as it is from neoconservatives and hawks in her own adopted party. And while it’s always fun to ding Trump, Democrats won’t earn much credit with their voters for tanking a former rising star in their own party who retains broad popularity. She is currently the most imperiled nominee, but if she can do well in front of the committee, she will likely be confirmed. If she fails, the failure will fall in no small part on Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) for not backing her to the hilt. (Cotton, for his part, has slowly but surely publicly moved into her camp. Thune seems to be holding his fire until after her committee hearing.)

Jan. 6 is a bigger boogeyman to DC Republicans than even abortion or deportations.

Nor does RFK Jr. pose a tempting trophy. The most prominent member of the Democrats’ most noble living dynasty, his most contentious views on modern medicine and health vibed neatly with upper-middle-class Democrats before his public defection to the Orange Man.

Patel, however, is a different animal entirely. Democrats and their supporters have no love for him. He literally wrote a fantasy Trump-impeachment children’s book series called “The Plot to Overthrow the King.” More importantly, his investigative work as a congressional staffer is among the top reasons politically biased anti-Trump abuses in the FBI and larger Department of Justice were uncovered in the first place. Kash Patel is a threat to Democrats from the outside. They do not want him on the inside.

Republicans, by contrast, largely do. But Democrats intend to put them on the defensive. We got a taste of their plan of attack on Patel during Pam Bondi’s hearing for U.S. attorney general, but that was before the president’s mass pardons and commutations for Jan. 6 prisoners and defendants. Now they’ve got a bone. And they’re not going to let go.

“You can expect Democrats to ask Kash a lot of questions about violence against law enforcement,” one member of Patel’s team told the Beltway Brief. “‘Do you support pardoning people who have assaulted an officer?’ ‘Do you support the Jan. 6 rioters that attacked the Capitol and threatened this chamber?’ ‘Do you think violent criminals should be set free?’ Those questions are coming.”

The Republican members of the Judiciary Committee that will hold Thursday’s hearing all appear to be lined up in favor of the nominee, who impressed in his private meetings with them. Of this week’s three most contested nominees, he’s got the clearest momentum within his own party. Of course, senators are fickle — and scare easily.

Remember: Jan. 6 is a bigger boogeyman to D.C. Republicans than even abortion or deportations. The first politicians to question J6ers’ long waits in squalid prisons without trial weren’t Republicans; they were Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). At the time, Republicans were still checking under their beds for J6 each night before turning out the lights. Conservative icon Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was still calling the rioters and protesters “terrorists” until finding his courage after criticism from Tucker Carlson, then of Fox News.

Already, Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine), Mike Rounds (S.D.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), and Bill Cassidy (La.) have publicly criticized the president’s sweeping pardons and commutations.

To make certain the momentum stays strong, Patel will need to turn the tables on the Democrats. He can easily point to Republican support for law enforcement after the riot, which only began to fall away when Democrats turned it into a license to dig through privileged party communications and a blatantly politicized Justice Department and FBI raided and imprisoned hundreds and hundreds of people over minor trespass crimes, Enron-era paperwork offenses, and other stacked-up, bogus charges.

Patel can also remind Democrats that his FBI will always investigate and make arrests for assaults on law enforcement, just as it is the prerogative of the Department of Justice to try those cases — and the prerogative of the president to grant pardon.

It’s all very doable. Fortunately for Republicans, the first two weeks of hearings have shown a disciplined effort that anticipates attacks and prepares for them.

They also get to have all three contentious hearings on a single morning, which is about as good as they could have planned for. “Democrats’ heads will be on a swivel Thursday morning,” one nomination adviser told Beltway Brief. “They won’t know which way to turn.”

Finally, Team Trump watched the Friday-night vote confirming Pete Hegseth to head the Department of Defense. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who publicly committed to opposing the president’s foreign policy agenda, joined Collins and Murkowski in voting “no.” It didn’t matter. Vice President JD Vance had fun casting the deciding vote confirming the secretary of defense.

In Washington, congressional leadership will often sanction members burnishing their credentials (and in McConnell’s case, petty grievances) with liberal constituents, so long as those votes don’t actually hold anything up. “It’s easy to be the third no,” one Trump team member told Beltway Brief. “It’s easy to be the fifth! But not the fourth. If you’re the fourth ‘no,’ it’s all on you.”

But Murkowski and Collins have both signaled they’re a “yes” on Patel. And while others have criticized the pardons, they’ve also reported positively on the nominee himself. Momentum is certainly on his side. And hey, even if he loses a vote or two, it won’t matter.

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