Gabbard’s Nomination Is the True Test of the Senate’s Power

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s abrupt withdrawal from consideration as attorney general this week was nearly as surprising to official Washington as his nomination was in the first place. Almost.

There was lots of conjecture as to why the oft-disgraced but never contrite Floridian would bail so soon from a nomination that was always bound to be an uphill struggle. Was this the plan all along? To use the nomination as an excuse to quit the House ahead of a damning Ethics Committee report and then quit the nomination to avoid the same report from coming out in the confirmation process?

Maybe. Or maybe it was the surfacing of new revelations or a diabolical plan to get Gaetz appointed to the Senate seat expected to be vacated by the elevation of Sen. Marco Rubio to secretary of state. Or maybe it was all just a ruse to make the real nominee, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, seem much more reasonable by comparison.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Whatever else it might have been, it was also most certainly this: Gaetz couldn’t get 51 votes for confirmation in the Senate. And while it doesn’t usually happen so quickly or with such crassness, Gaetz’s story is a familiar one in history: the freighted nominee who drops out under pressure from a president’s own party.

Even Gaetz’s stated rationale that he was “becoming a distraction” is exactly what departing nominees throughout recent history have said. From Zoë Baird in 1993 to Linda Chavez in 2001 to Tom Daschle in 2009 to Andrew Puzder in 2017 to Neera Tanden in 2021, all have bid their adieu with the word “distraction” on their lips, or at least in their press releases.

That usually doesn’t happen until March of the first year of the new presidential term, but with Trump everything tends to be faster, louder, and more chaotic. Perhaps this is just the maximum MAGA way of a failed nomination. But the principle is the same: The votes are the votes. 

It was no coincidence that the Gaetz defenestration came immediately after the former congressman had his first meet-and-greet with Senate Republicans as nominee. One imagines that what senators were willing to say behind closed doors was different from the general surprise with which they greeted the pick in public. But even if it was all just forced smiles in private, Gaetz was almost certainly facing the opposition of many multiples of the four Senate Republicans’ no votes needed to scuttle the nomination.

Media attention is now focused on two other Trump nominees, Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the Department of Health and Human Services. That’s understandable. They’re both celebrities and some of the baggage they are carrying is so lurid, Hegseth from a settlement he paid to keep a rape accusation quiet, and Kennedy from claims from his children’s former babysitter that he had repeatedly groped her.

Those stories will play out in the months to come, and, depending on whether other credible allegations emerge, determine in part whether Hegseth and Kennedy join the ranks of the scuttled nominees. 

But the focus among Republican senators and staffers right now seems to be on another less titillating story: The pick of former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to be the nation’s intelligence chief. Gabbard isn’t in hot water because of her private life, but because of her public positions, most notably a sympathetic posture toward Russia and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as well as her support for the notorious Edward Snowden, perpetrator of one of the most damaging intelligence breaches in American history.

Senate Republicans are doing triage on Trump’s picks, and Gabbard’s is next on the trauma list. The Senate Intelligence Committee is one of the last bastions of functionality and bipartisanship in the upper chamber, and its members will not be well disposed to even the idea of giving Gabbard a platform in a hearing to push her claims. 

While the furor over Hegseth and Kennedy plays out in the press, keep an eye on Gabbard. She will need to go a long way to prevent four Republicans from nixing the pick, and while she isn’t as easily discredited as Gaetz, the position she’s seeking is just as sensitive and significant as the one he was seeking.

There are plenty of Senate Republicans with primary elections to worry about in 2026, and they won’t be happy to be seen opposing any Trump picks. But there are those too with general elections to worry about in potentially competitive states, certainly Susan Collins in Maine and Thom Tillis in North Carolina, but also, depending on how sharp the midterm snapback may be, incumbents from Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, and, potentially, whoever is picked to replace J.D. Vance in Ohio. Those folks are in a double bind: They don’t want to court primary problems—but they also can’t let it hang too far out in a possibly competitive general election. As they weigh Gabbard and the rest, they have to wonder what kind of electorate they will be facing in 2026. Trump has defied a lot of political gravity in the past four years, but the midterm curse is a relentless force.

Then there are others who might just not care too much about sucking up to Trump voters, led by former Republican leader Mitch McConnell. He hasn’t said whether he’s seeking an eighth term in 2026, but it’s hard to imagine that he will be interested in doing too much to curry favor with anybody. 

That’s a long way of saying that it’s only been two weeks, people. Democrats (and some Republicans) will be very upset about some of the nominees who make it through a process that will consume a great deal of the next three months. But as the Gaetz drama shows us, it’s better to pace yourself and save up some outrage and anxiety for later on. You’re probably going to need it.

So far, Senate Republicans are acting normally. The carte blanche recess appointments idea is dying a quiet death and it seems likely that regular hearings and the slow, plodding pace of the Senate is still the same. The election of John Thune as McConnell’s replacement, despite the objections of MAGA world, is proof of those things.

The lesson of McConnell’s successful tenure is that the most effective opposition to Donald Trump’s excesses is quiet. Nobody is going to win an argument with Trump or convince him to change course for the good of his party or the country. If anything, public opposition only makes him dig in harder.

The next chapter of this story isn’t about spin or “messaging.” It’s about power and who’s got the votes, and who doesn’t.

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STATSHOT

Polling Roulette

[Financial Times analysis of US General Social Survey]

TIME OUT: GREASING THE GEARS OF HISTORY

Aeon: “Few foods can compete with olive oil. Its rich history, stretching back to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians, plays an enormous part in its ongoing symbolic associations. Across a range of Mediterranean cultures, olive oil has been an inordinately versatile and useful product, even regarded as a means of connecting with the divine. … Next time you dip a piece of bread into a good olive oil, savor it for a moment, and seek that peppery flavor on the back of your tongue. It’s a flavor that conveys the presence of healthy polyphenols, and that pepperiness is a celebrated protagonist of the Mediterranean lifestyle. … But that very pepperiness tastes much like the advent of industrial capitalism and the creation of modern power relations in the Mediterranean world. It tastes like the growing network of global shipping routes, and the increasing rotational speed of well-lubricated industrial machinery. It’s a flavor that announced the dawn of a new world, the flavor of mechanization.”

TRUMP FUMES AS DEMS RACE TO CONFIRM JUDGES

Axios: “President-elect Trump is demanding that Senate Republicans show up and try to stop Democrats from confirming more judges. President Biden is now 15 judicial confirmations away from the record set by Trump in his first term. Trump posted Wednesday on X: ‘The Democrats are trying to stack the Courts with Radical Left Judges on their way out the door. Republican Senators need to Show Up and Hold the Line…’ Democrats confirmed two more judges on Wednesday by 50-48 margins, with Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Mike Braun (Indiana) missing the votes. If they’d voted, Vice President Harris would have been unavailable to break the 50-50 tie as she’s currently vacationing in Hawaii. … ‘I am very angry – 90% of success in life is showing up,’ Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters. … Sen. John Thune unveiled a plan Monday to aggressively defend against Biden’s final nominees. … Sen. Chuck Schumer is prepared to grind through that defense with late night and weekend votes.”

Understanding Trump’s Latino supporters: New Yorker: “Donald Trump, according to exit polls, won a greater share of the Latino vote than any Republican Presidential candidate in at least the past half century, and maybe ever. … Bluntly asserting that Trump’s Latino supporters misdiagnosed the root cause of their struggles and that they are, in fact, racist and sexist isn’t the way to begin a conversation that could lead them to vote for Democrats going forward. More concretely, it also defies logic that a fourteen-percentage-point shift in four years can be attributed to the racism Latinos hold within themselves. … It is easy for me to believe Latinos who say they voted for Trump because Democrats haven’t always delivered on their promises of protection and prosperity. It’s far from certain that Trump will do it, either—but many Latinos have grown desperate enough to give him a shot. … No group of voters, including Latinos, should be loyal to any party, because parties haven’t always been loyal to them.”

Harris’ NYC collapse epitomizes Dems working-class problem: New York Magazine: “The more camouflage Harris-Walz trucker hats I saw around Brooklyn, the greater my sense of foreboding. … Neighborhoods like Park Slope are some of the only ones in the city that remained dark blue this cycle. It was instead the areas of the city where some of the least wealthy and least white reside that broke hardest toward Trump. … Beneath the tracks of the 7 train, it is not difficult to find newly galvanized Trump voters. … When I asked [restaurant owner Carlos Bermejo] whom he voted for, he looked at me like I was kidding: ‘Donald Trump. You gotta do that. Everybody knows that.’ … The area’s pro-Trump turn mirrored Democratic losses on the U.S.-Mexico border and other predominantly Hispanic areas where the migrant crisis was acutely felt as well as in cities like San Francisco.”

Low urban turnout tanked Harris in blue wall states: NBC News: “The largest county in each state — Wayne County, Michigan, home of Detroit; Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania; and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin — had either the worst or second-worst shift in votes cast of any county in their state. … Out of more than 1,700 precincts in Philadelphia, 73% had fewer voters in 2024 than in 2020. Overall, the total number of votes in Philadelphia decreased by 2.9% — resulting in approximately 20,000 fewer voters this year. Meanwhile, the rest of Pennsylvania saw a 2.1% increase. … Across the precincts in the northern part of Detroit, where voters are predominantly Black, the total number of votes tended to be more down than up. … Even though turnout grew slightly overall in [Milwaukee], just over half of precincts (58%) experienced a turnout decrease. Comparing Milwaukee’s sluggish turnout to Dane County — which is Wisconsin’s other large Democratic county, where turnout increased by over 6%.” 

A politics defined more by class than race: Wall Street Journal: “Trump made gains with most demographic groups in this month’s election. But one of the biggest swings was among voters of all races who don’t have a four-year college degree. He won them by 13 percentage points this time versus 4 percentage points in 2020—a huge change in a group that accounted for more than half of the electorate. … The shift toward class-based sorting also comes as some of the nation’s longtime racial categories—white, Black and Hispanic—are dissolving fast into more fluid and complex identities. As those categories blur, other factors, like education levels and class, are playing larger roles in Americans’ quality-of-life and are increasingly driving voters’ choices. … Hispanic and Black voters throughout the country echoed this idea, that notions of fealty to the Democratic Party based on race were outdated—and that economic concerns drove the shift to Republicans and Trump.”

BRIEFLY

North Carolina GOP moves to strip Dem governor of executive power—NBC News

GOP delights as Mark Robinson “not considering” 2026 Senate run—WRAL

In first, California rejects minimum wage increase—Los Angeles Times

Alaska ranked choice voting survives, barely—Anchorage Daily News

WITHIN EARSHOT: THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN

“Well, I’ve been very, very clear if Dr. Oz agrees to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare, I’m absolutely going to vote for the dude. I don’t have any hard feelings or anything. I’d have a beer with the dude.”—Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman buries the hatchet and indicates he would support his 2022 opponent in his nomination for administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

MAILBAG

“What do you think of the possibility of Trump proposing the revocation of the 22nd Amendment re: term limits? I realize he will be 83 when his term ends but he certainly could run again if the Trump appointees on the Supreme Court decide the amendment is unconstitutional.”—Carole Wolf, Hemet, California

Ms. Wolfe,

If we’re imagining that five justices on the Supreme Court would be down for invalidating parts of the Constitution to keep Trump in power, why stop there? Article II, Section 1 sets the duration of a president’s term at four years in language no more or less ambiguous or authoritative than the 22nd Amendment, so why not just skip the 2028 election altogether?

I’m sorry to be flip about it, but I think it’s time for us to think about these things in concrete terms. If we think the Supreme Court is really capable of invalidating a plainly worded amendment that has been in the Constitution for 73 years, then it would be capable of pretty much anything.

Here’s the text: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

The amendment, which came after decades of consideration and more than three years of debate about its specific wording, received two-thirds support among the members of both houses of Congress and was then ratified by three-fourths of all the states. It can no more be ignored than any other part of the Constitution and is far more clear than those ambiguous passages most often neglected.

As for repealing the amendment, maybe 290 members of the House and 67 members of the Senate would vote for such a thing, and maybe it would then be ratified by the legislatures of 38 states in time for Trump to run again. But does that seem likely to you? Just imagine the backlash from voters about even proposing such a thing. 

I think that Trump foes’ catastrophization of the future makes dealing with the actual challenges of the present more difficult. If the worry is that he will become a dictator for life, then who’s ready to roll up their sleeves and do the ordinary scut work of governing? 

Republics fall bit by bit, before they tip over. Is it possible that we are close to a tipping point? Maybe closer even than I would like to admit? It’s possible. 

But when it comes to things like invalidating plain, well-established provisions of the Constitution, I’d proceed with caution. 

Warily,

c

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CUTLINE CONTEST: RASPUTIN ON THE RITZ 

This week’s contestants had an embarrassment of riches with which to work in this photo of former Rep. Matt Gaetz, his wife, Ginger, and Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a black-tie soirée. Our winner went with new age vibes: 

“Just a little longer now. I can feel the fluoride coming out.”—Richard Basuk, New York, New York

Winner, Golden Bachelor Division:

“Ginger, will you accept this Ivermectin and join me in the tinfoil-lined Fantasy Suite?”—Tripp Whitbeck, Arlington, Virginia

Winner, Enchantment Under the Sea Division:

“So nice to meet you. Matt says you met when he chaperoned your high school dance.”—Allan Hardcastle, Lincoln, California

Winner, Cobblepot Division:

“Catwoman, Joker, and Penguin plot Gotham City’s destruction.”—Allen Mabry, Dallas, Texas

Winner, Singed or Scorched Division:

“Woman smiles while trying to decide if the fire or frying pan is better.”—Jeff Tatusko, Plum, Pennsylvania

CATCH OF THE DAY

Vice: “Some Norwegian fishermen off the coast of Tromsø were out and about on their vessel named Øygutt looking for halibut. Something significantly larger than fish, however, found its way into their trawl net. The fishermen caught the USS Virginia, a 115-meter-long nuclear-powered attack submarine outfitted with cruise missiles. … The ship’s crew, made up entirely of young men in their 20s, had no idea that the USS Virginia had been dragging its net for two nautical miles before its crew realized what was going on and cut it loose. … The fishermen were unaware of it until they were contacted by the US Coast Guard. They were on the way to a new spot hoping to catch more halibut, all the while blissfully ignorant to the fact that their net was now being dragged away by the setting for several excellent ’90s military thrillers.” 

Nate Moore contributed to this report.