CIA Director Mike Pompeo made history on Monday — just not in the way he would have wanted.
Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo faces historic Senate snub
He’ll probably get the job anyway.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote on Pompeo’s nomination to be President Trump’s new secretary of state on Monday, is split fairly evenly, with 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats. All 10 Democrats have signaled they will vote against Pompeo, as has Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. Unless one of them changes their mind, Pompeo will become the first secretary of state nominee not to receive an endorsement from the committee since the 19th century, when it started considering candidates, the Senate Historical Office told me.
That won’t necessarily kill Pompeo’s nomination because GOP leaders say they’ll bring him up for a floor vote by the entire Senate regardless of what the committee does. Most observers expect Pompeo to squeak through the narrowly divided Senate, where Republicans hold a 51-49 advantage, because two Democrats hav already said they’ll vote for Trump’s pick. The endorsement by Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who are both up for reelection in states Trump won easily, could pave the way for other vulnerable red-state Democrats to vote for Pompeo as well.
If he makes it through, Pompeo will be the first Cabinet secretary of any kind to win their job without a committee endorsement since 1945, the Senate Historical Office told me. That dubious distinction is currently held by Henry Wallace, who served as commerce secretary from 1945 to 1946.
All of which means Monday’s vote will be memorable — and potentially historic.
“I am trying to think about which Mike Pompeo I will be asked to vote on”
As my colleague Zack Beauchamp reported, the most telling moment of Pompeo’s April 12 nomination hearing came at the end, when New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez — the committee’s top Democrat — ripped into the nominee:
Menendez ticked off contradiction after contradiction: Pompeo said during the hearing that he supports a diplomatic approach to Iran’s nuclear program, but in the past has said that regime change is “the only way” to deal with the problem. He said today that he opposes regime change in North Korea but had mused just last year about toppling the Kim regime. And it went on from there.
The pattern was clear: Pompeo has a long history of extreme rhetoric, on issues ranging from the use of military force to Islam to LGBTQ rights — but had spent the entire hearing presenting a much less extreme, and more palatable, version of his views. ...
“As we close here,” the senator said, “I am trying to think about which Mike Pompeo I will be asked to vote on.”
There’s no question Pompeo has impressive credentials. He’s a West Point and Harvard Law School graduate, a US Army veteran, and a three-term Congress member who first came to Washington as part of the Tea Party movement in 2010. He got coveted spots on the House Intelligence Committee and, in 2014, a seat on the Select Committee on Benghazi, both positions that would usually go to more senior members.
But he became a lightning rod during his 15 months as Trump’s CIA director. Democrats gripe that Pompeo acted like a Trump crony by, for example, distorting intelligence about Russia’s effect on the 2016 presidential election in ways that favored Trump. “The intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” Pompeo said at a Washington think tank event last October.
The problem is three intelligence agencies didn’t assess the impact Moscow may or may not have had on the election’s final tally.
Pompeo’s confirmation troubles mirror those of his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, who received a razor-thin 11-10 vote from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 23, 2017. Just over a week later, Tillerson became the secretary of state by a 56-43 margin, with only three Democrats — including Heitkamp — joining in. If he squeaks by, Pompeo will almost certainly receive fewer votes.
And that may be the ultimate insult. Tillerson, as Beauchamp has written, is widely seen as one of the worst secretaries of state in American history. Incredibly, senators appear to have even less confidence in Pompeo, which means America’s probable next secretary of state has his work cut out for him overseas — and here at home.
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