President elect Donald Trump has chosen Robert F. Kennedy
Junior to lead his Department of Health and Human Services
. Adding another name to his list of controversial cabinet
picks. That list includes Tulsi Gabbard as Director of
National Intelligence. In the past, Gabbert has been
accused of repeating Russian talking points, for example,
implying that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had valid grounds for
invading Ukraine. And Trump has chosen Congressman Matt Gates
to be his attorney general. Gates has never worked
in the justice department or as a prosecutor and was
investigated by the justice department over sex trafficking allegations.
Here's how some Republicans on Capitol Hill have responded to
that choice. Elections have consequences. He chose Matt
Gates. Matt will come before the committee and he
will be asked hard questions. I barely know Gates
. All I know is he likes picking fights on
social media. He'll have to deal with that in
committees, but I don't know his background. I'm
going to look at him affair here. My own
presumption with all of his nominees is that the president's
entitled to choose his cabinet and I presume I'll support
them. Ursula Perano is a congressional reporter focused on
the Senate for Politico and Ursula. You have your
work cut out for you. Thank you so much
for being here today. Appreciate it. Yeah.
Thanks for having me. Let's start with, uh
RFK Junior to health and human services. He's a
vaccine skeptic. Uh, he promotes raw milk.
He has a brain worm from eating dog and he's
now going to be in charge with the, of
the Food and drug administration. Should he get this
job? Do you think the Senate will actually confirm
RFK Junior given some of those real conservative, real
uh controversial stances, shall we say? I think
he is going to be one of the trickier ones
, but right now, it is going to be
a matter of Senate Republicans choosing their battles. Rfk
Junior is one nominee of at least I'd say a
couple so far. I think between there is a
Fox and Friends host being nominated for Secretary of Defense
, as you mentioned earlier, the lead up Matt
Gates and then Tulsi Gabbard, uh Senate Republicans are
going to kind of have to balance where they uh
feel or who they feel is most objectionable. I
do think RFK Junior, a lot of his comments
on vaccines are going to come up, for example
. Uh we the Senate dismissed very shortly before uh
the announcement was made that Trump intended to nominate RKJR
, but I did catch some Republicans on the way
out of the building and that was something that was
immediately clear that there were going to be questions about
Mitch mcconnell himself is a polio survivor is something that's
been talked about in the days leading up where people
were seeing this nomination coming down the pipeline. So
there are going to be huge questions about if Republicans
can rally around this nomination and some of these others
when they've only got a couple of votes, they
could lose before the nominations just fall apart. It
started off pretty comforting for a lot of Republicans,
right. Marco Rubio, pretty mainstream guy, Secretary
of State Waltz. He's been critical of Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau here in Canada, but he didn't scare
a lot of Republicans. But the, the Gabbard
Gates, Hegseth A a and now RFK Junior,
I mean, it puts senators in a very difficult
position, right? Because each one of those has
red flags and, and it's going to be an
enormous challenge for them to approach this. Yeah.
And that's something a lot of people are talking about
is in some ways, this is creating almost a
sliding scale of objections, right? Like when you're
looking at somebody like Matt Gates who's going to come
to the Senate and Republican senators do want to advance
Trump's agenda. They don't want to be seen as
the problem Children within the conference. And there's no
GOP leadership that is trying to prove its ability to
collaborate with the Republican trifecta in Washington. You're gonna
have to figure out how many times you can potentially
say no before you're going to be cast as the
issue or like I said, the problem trial.
So it's interesting on Mat Gates because he was investigated
for the by the justice department, they didn't lay
charges, but this was into basically underage sex trafficking
. And we know the House Ethics Committee was doing
a probe into him as a sitting congressman, but
he's resigned and now that committee has lost its jurisdiction
essentially. But there is some talk, this report
could still come out. I mean, this feels
like the sort of thing, Ursula that could be
very tough to have land in the public domain when
you're going to run the Department of Justice for the
United States government. Yeah. And there are a
lot of questions about if Senators Senate Republicans are going
to want to see that report in a confirmation process
. We've heard a couple of Senate Republicans say today
that they think that would be important to be able
to have a look at this report was likely to
come out very imminently. So the timing is quite
interesting to a lot of people Democrats themselves are urging
the House to release the report and there's a lot
of pressure in that direction. And the thing I
would note as well is that Matt gates in the
house among House Republicans isn't actually particularly well received.
He led the charge to oust the House Speaker last
year Kevin mccarthy and that does linger over him.
So he doesn't necessarily have many allies on that side
of the building that I think are gonna be working
particularly hard to protect him when he is dealing with
senators on the other side. How, how do
you see the process going because there is the normal
Senate confirmation process. But Donald Trump has made clear
that he would like to see some recess appointments here
which lowers the scrutiny and, and fast tracks essentially
the oversight process uh to get his picks in place
. Do we have any clear sense yet of how
the Senate is going to approach this? Will they
insist on full hearings for everybody or because some of
these people be recess appointments as, as the president
wants? So the recess appointments idea put out there
by President Trump is something that hasn't been done in
a long time in the Senate. But there is
, there are a lot of questions around if new
leadership, the GOP Republicans or the Republican Senate just
got a new leader yesterday, John Thune, if
he would permit recess appointments, but there is hesitance
from a lot of Senate Republicans to give up that
sort of uh leverage or right to advice and consent
that they have on nominees and if they open the
door to recess appointments, when could they close it
? Um So there's a precedent question there that a
lot of people are having to mull over at this
point. Um But yeah, I mean, a
lot of nominees are going to be going through.
John Du keeps saying that he is going to give
everyone an equal shot. They would have to go
to committee first and get through committee before they could
get to a floor vote. So there's a chance
that if some of these go down, they're going
to go down before they even get to the full
senate. Ok. So Thune is of South Dakota
was selected as the majority leader, was not the
pick of sort of the mega wing of the party
, right? They wanted Rick Scott from, from
Florida, as I understand it, there has been
a lot of frenzy and look, Elon Musk is
suddenly a player in this, whether you like it
or not. There was this frenzy on, on
, on ex Twitter of people threatening senators and Republicans
that if you don't give Trump exactly who he wants
, you're gonna get primary. Now, I know
congressman would be more at risk because of the two
year cycles and senators with the six year cycles have
a little bit more durability there. But do you
see that potentially playing a role in any of this
because that can be a pretty ferocious movement when it's
unleashed uh in your direction? Yeah, there was
a lot of pressure, particularly from the online,
right? A lot of conservative outside voices for senators
to support Rick Scott. There were three senators competing
for the Scott or this spot, Rick Scott John
Cornyn and John Thune. Obviously, June, John
Thune won yesterday. Um I do think this is
going to have an impact going forward in that we
saw a clear, clearly not entirely United Conference yesterday
coming out of the vote, the vote was close
, it was to multiple ballots to elect this new
leader. And I think there are a lot of
conservatives on the right flank of both the party and
the Senate Republican conference who are going to be looking
for any opportunity to pressure leadership to pressure their members
of Congress to be pushing for Trump's agenda to the
maximum degree. And there will be a lot of
tests on new leadership about how they balance the institutional
practices of the Senate and the voters of their own
party that sent them back. I just as a
final question for you, uh Ursula John Thune is
someone I know uh senior officials here in Canada are
gonna want to speak with uh quite soon as they
reach out to speak with the leader in the Senate
about the Trump agenda and tariffs and trade and immigration
and all of those things that could affect the trading
relationship. H how, how do we imagine John
Thune's style will compare to Mitch mcconnell? I know
he was his whip, I believe uh uh uh
a continuation of that or a total departure. What
do you think we might see from Senator Thune,
a lot of people see it as a continuation of
some form of the mcconnell era. He does currently
work under mcconnell, as you mentioned as whip and
they both do have sort of this like institutionalist,
you know, belief in the Senate as a,
a legislative body, a cooling saucer as it's often
said compared to the House. Uh but John Thune
has had to have a lot of conversations with Senate
Republicans who are more conservative or wanted to see rules
changes or wanted to see changes in how leadership was
approached and coming out of the vote yesterday, we
heard from a lot of those more conservative senators saying
they got reassurances that they felt that Boone was going
to be receptive to potential changes or adjusting the way
that leadership works with members on things like votes or
amendments to bills or communicating about policy ahead of time
. So I think he is still seen as sort
of a continuation of mcconnell, but with some shifts
in the future, Ursa Loran, it's great to
have you back on the show. Ursula Loran covers
the Senate for Politico. Thanks for being here.
We appreciate it. Thank you.