Ben Carson appears poised to clear the Senate Banking Committee and head toward confirmation after laying out a conservative agenda for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but also winning praise from some Democrats.
The former neurosurgeon offered uncompromising statements on several controversial issues, and didn’t elicit any significant opposition from Republicans during Thursday’s hearing. With 12 Republican votes and 11 Democratic votes on the panel, Carson only needs to avoid any Republican defections to advance to a vote in the full Senate.
During the hearing, two Democrats from states won by President-elect Trump signaled that they did not intend to try to hold up his confirmation: Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. Others signaled that they were taking a friendly approach to his confirmation process, even if they weren’t committed to supporting him.
“You’ve done an incredible job,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, the freshman Democrat from Nevada, at the hearing’s end.
Carson began his more than two hours of testimony with an extemporaneous reflection on his own rise out of poverty. He maintained an upbeat attitude, and said later the questioning was “actually kind of fun.”
The relatively easy hearing added to the momentum that Carson got from the endorsement of key industry groups. “Today’s confirmation hearing demonstrated that Dr. Carson is clearly ready to take on the challenges as the next Cabinet secretary at HUD,” said Granger MacDonald, the chairman of the National Association of Home Builders, who called for a “quick Senate confirmation.”
Carson’s apparent success, however, wasn’t because he shied away from staking out conservative positions on key items of HUD business. Instead, he embraced several measures likely to please the conservative base that drafted him into running for the presidency in 2015.
President Obama’s rule for enforcing fair housing, which conservatives have decried as a national zoning rule, was a “central dictation of people’s lives,” Carson maintained.
Carson said he would “really examine” last week’s rate cut on premiums for insurance on mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration. “I too was surprised to see something of this nature done on the way out the door,” he told Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa.
Carson also said he would cut back regulations in an effort to promote building and lending.
He even suggested that the private sector might be able to replace government guarantees for mortgages in maintaining the existence of the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage — the closest thing to a sacred cow in housing finance policy. Concerns over the availability of the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage helped stall a House Republican effort to overhaul housing finance in 2013.
That’s not to say that Carson’s testimony was all red meat. He promised Democrats’ he would seek aggressively to remove lead from public housing. He allayed their fears about discrimination by saying that he would “follow the law” for federally-protected groups in shelter, at one point saying that the 1968 Fair Housing Act “was one of the best pieces of legislation we’ve ever had.”
And he promised that he would defend HUD’s budget, rather than slashing it as suggested by campaign trail comments. Furthermore, he said that he intended to embark on a national listening tour after confirmation, and afterward “put together a world-class plan for housing in this country.” That plan, he said, might involve less spending, but it also might involve increasing it.
