The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) will vote today on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary and, barring Republican opposition, he could be confirmed by the full Senate as soon as tomorrow.
Republicans including SASC member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have continued to raise concerns about Hagel, a former GOP senator from Nebraska. He has irked former colleagues with statements on Israel, Iran, the Iraq War, nuclear weapons, and the Pentagon budget (Defense Daily, Jan. 31).
Regardless, Hagel has support from Democrats who control the Senate. SASC Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a Hagel supporter, has scheduled a vote on the nomination for 2:30 p.m. today.
“It is the chairman’s intention to vote on the nomination after the members have an opportunity for discussion,” SASC spokeswoman Tara Andringa said yesterday in a statement.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the full Senate could vote to confirm Hagel as soon as tomorrow.
Levin had hoped to hold the SASC vote on Feb. 7, a week after Hagel’s confirmation hearing, when SASC Republicans grilled him in a prosecutorial manner.
But SASC Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and two dozen other Republicans declared in a Feb. 6 letter that Hagel must first disclose more financial information than the committee had received, related to his past compensation and any foreign ties of private entities that provided him money.
Levin balked at their request, arguing in a Feb. 8 letter the SASC “cannot have two different sets of financial disclosure standards for nominees, one for Senator Hagel and one for other nominees.”
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a senior SASC member and its former ranking member, said yesterday he believes Hagel has “fulfilled the rigorous requirements that the committee demands of every presidential nominee to be secretary of defense.”
“As a result, I believe it is appropriate for the Armed Services Committee to vote on Senator Hagel’s nomination and determine whether to move this nomination to the Senate floor where members can debate and express their own judgments on Senator Hagel,” McCain said in a statement.
While there has been buzz about Republicans walking out of the SASC vote on Hagel’s nomination, McCain said he will not participate in any such action, which he dubbed “disrespectful” to Levin and counter to the committee’s “best traditions.”
Still, McCain said he shares “many of the concerns expressed by my colleagues regarding Senator Chuck Hagel’s positions on many national security policy issues.” McCain–who is particularly upset Hagel would not say the so-called surge of troops during the Iraq War was a success–said the nominee’s confirmation hearing performance was “discouraging and disappointing,” arguing Hagel’s “often adversarial attitude toward legitimate questions from committee members was troubling.”
McCain also said he shares Graham’s concerns about the attack on the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.
Graham said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he could put a hold on the nominations of Hagel and John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s pick to lead the CIA, until he receives more information from the White House on the Benghazi attack.
Inhofe also suggested, on “Fox News Sunday,” that he would support a filibuster of Hagel, a move that would require the objection of two-thirds of the Senate to overcome.
A filibuster is different than a hold, though both procedural moves can delay a confirmation vote.
McCain, for his part, said he would not support a Republican filibuster of Hagel’s nomination.
As Republicans raise concerns about Hagel, outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is nonetheless preparing for his retirement.
Obama and other officials feted Panetta at a farewell ceremony last Friday at Fort Myer in Virginia. And the current defense secretary is not scheduled to appear at a series of congressional hearings this week on pending “sequestration” budget cuts, at which the service chiefs and other senior Pentagon leaders will testify.