A top Republican group is attacking Senate Democrats over their plan to obstruct President-elect Trump’s Cabinet nominees ahead of the scheduled hearings next week.
America Rising Squared released a web ad on Friday titled “We Owe Deference,” attacking Democrats who are looking to slow down the nominating process by focusing on past statements where the lawmakers called for “deference” toward the president’s administration picks. The video focuses on comments from Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Tim Kaine, D-Va.
“I think we owe deference to a president for choices to executive positions, and I think that that is a very important thing to grapple with,” Kaine said in February 2013. “The American public choose someone to be president, they’re giving that individual a mandate to govern, and that mandate includes the assembly of the team that the president feels is the appropriate team.”
“And we have always had the tradition of moving these nominees as quickly as we possibly could,” Feinstein said in December 2008, nearly two months before President Obama assumed the presidency.
In May 2013, Warren attacked Republicans for holding up Cabinet selections and judge nominations put forth by Obama, labeling their delay tactics as “wrong.”
Hearings for Trump’s Cabinet nominees are slated to begin next Tuesday when Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, his nominee for attorney general, meets with the Senate Judiciary Committee. Five of Trump’s selections are set for hearings on Wednesday, including Rex Tillerson, his pick for secretary of state, and Betsy DeVos, who was tapped to run the Department of Education.
