President-elect Trump’s nomination of Rex Tillerson to lead the State Department is still “salvageable,” despite a rough confirmation hearing, according to one of his toughest critics.
“I think his nomination is salvageable, from my point of view,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on MSNBC during a joint appearance with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Graham is one of the three Republicans who are most likely to defect and vote against Tillerson, but he offered that consolation hours after Sen. Marco Rubio adopted the most strident stance of any GOP lawmaker during the confirmation process. Rubio faulted Tillerson for declining to call Russian President Vladimir “a war criminal” and for demurring when asked about human rights abuses by other powerful governments.
“You don’t want to go into the job naming one of the leaders of the world a war criminal, but here’s the problem: You’ve got to deal with Russia as it is,” Graham said. “He should have turned to Marco and everybody on the committee and said, ‘I see what they did in Aleppo, I know what they did in Aleppo, it is wrong and it is time for Russia to pay a price across the board not just for hacking the election but for destabilizing the world.’ But at the end of the day, Trump’s the guy, not Tillerson. I think Tillerson’s a very qualified guy. But I’d like to see more strength and clarity when it comes to Russia and the moral clarity that Marco was talking about.”
Tillerson argued that making such statements could backfire on other American policy interests, but Rubio countered that the State Department must not avoid condemning human rights abuses for political reasons.
“[Refusal to condemn human rights abuses] demoralizes these people all over the world and it leads people to conclude this — which is damaging and it hurt us during the Cold War — and that is this: America cares about democracy and freedom, as long as it’s not being violated by someone that they need for something else,” Rubio told Tillerson during Wednesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. “That cannot be who we are in the 21st century. We need a secretary of state that will fight for these principles.”
Rubio didn’t commit to voting against Tillerson, and said he still needs to think about the decision, which leaves the Trump team an opportunity to follow up on the questioning and possibly work with Rubio to get him on board.
The script for the compromise between Rubio and Tillerson might already be written. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, declined to apply the term “war criminal” to Putin, moments after Graham had done so.
“A war crime is a technical matter that you adjudicate under the laws of war, but [Putin’s] a thug and he’s committed acts of war, I’m not at all hesitant to say so, and we need to stand up to him and resist, and it’s clear he’s also committed repeated efforts to undermine America,” Cruz said. “We need a president and an administration that recognizes those who are expressing hostility to America and we need a president to stand up to them.”
That was good enough for Graham. “If [Tillerson] had given that answer, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” the South Carolina senator, historically a fierce and mocking critic of Cruz, interjected. “So: Ted for secretary of state!”
