Republicans on Wednesday went around the usual rules to advance the nominations of Steven Mnuchin to be treasury secretary and Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., to be health and human services secretary, a day after Democrats postponed the vote by not showing up.
After Democrats boycotted the Senate Finance Committee votes Tuesday, denying the quorum needed for a vote to proceed, chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah called another vote Wednesday. When Democrats again refused to show up, Republicans changed the rules to allow the votes to proceed without them.
Both nominees passed with only Republican votes.
After advancing the nominees, Hatch denounced the Democrats’ boycott as “just another way of roughing up the president and his choice of nominees.”
Suspending the rules of the committee to clear the nominations, Hatch acknowledged, was an unprecedented step. But he argued that it was only a response to the “unprecedented obstruction” by Democrats.
Democrats had refused to attend the vote unless both candidates provided more information about their records and ethics disclosures. In a letter sent just before the meeting Wednesday morning, the Democrats outlined those questions for Hatch.
“[W]e have significant concern that both Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Price gave inaccurate and misleading testimony and responses to questions to the Committee,” the letter read.
Where are @SenateFinance Dems this morning? Standing with the ppl of OH and others hurt by the abusive practices of Mnuchin’s bank. pic.twitter.com/AvLpnxyJko
— Sherrod Brown (@SenSherrodBrown) February 1, 2017
Hatch, however, argued that Democrats had sufficient opportunity to get information from the candidates, to challenge them during the hearings, and to ask him for more time before the originally scheduled votes.
Boycotting the vote, he said, was a “cheap political ploy, and they should be ashamed.”
