Jonathan Chait writes:

Pete Hegseth, President-Elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, was initially considered one of his most endangered nominees. But after the MAGA movement organized a campaign to threaten Republicans who expressed reservations about Hegseth’s fitness, criticism dried up quickly. “We gave the Senate an attitude adjustment,” Mike Davis, a Republican operative known for his florid threats to lock up Trump’s political targets, told Politico.

That attitude adjustment was on vivid display in Hegseth’s confirmation hearing today before the Armed Services Committee. During the proceedings, the Republican majority displayed no willingness to block or even seriously vet a nominee who resides far outside the former boundaries of acceptability for a position of immense power.

Hegseth’s liabilities can be divided into four categories, each of them individually disqualifying:

1. personal behavior, including allegations of drunkenness on the job, of maintaining a hostile workplace, and of sexual assault
2. lack of managerial experience, or at least positive managerial experience (According to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Hegseth ran two tiny advocacy groups so poorly that he was forced to step down.)
3. a disregard for the laws of war and a habit of excusing the actions of  convicted war criminals
4. an enthusiasm for domestic political combat that blends into an inability to distinguish Democrats from enemy combatants

Hegseth’s strategy today was to evade these problems altogether. In this, he had the full cooperation of the committee’s Republican majority. [Continue reading…]

Jane Mayer writes:

The Trump team’s efforts to crush dissent range from public-media campaigns targeting vulnerable senators in conservative states (and paid for by unelected billionaires) to more underhanded tactics aimed at intimidating and discrediting potentially hostile witnesses. Hegseth’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, for instance, has threatened to sue Jane Doe, Hegseth’s anonymous rape accuser, and her lawyer for defamation if her allegations prevent him from being confirmed. So far, it appears that such tactics may be working. Several potential witnesses, including the accuser, have declined to speak out publicly and have elected not to testify at Tuesday’s hearing.

Republican senators have disparaged anonymous critics of Hegseth. But some of these senators have also declined to speak face to face and confidentially with such critics, including the woman who accused Hegseth of rape. According to three sources with knowledge of the situation, Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, is one of the senators who have turned down offers to hear privately from Hegseth’s accuser. Ernst is a pro-Trump conservative on the Armed Services Committeee, and her vote is seen as the linchpin to Hegseth’s confirmation, because she is both a military veteran and a survivor of sexual assault who has championed women’s rights. (Ernst’s office did not respond to questions from The New Yorker about her refusal to see Hegseth’s accuser.) Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine, also declined an offer to meet with the alleged victim. Collins’s press secretary, Blake Kernen, confirmed the outreach but said that the senator believes that such allegations should be brought to the relevant committee—in this case, the Armed Services Committee—of which she is not a member. Collins has, however, met with Hegseth. Afterward, she said she would wait to decide on his nomination until he had undergone an F.B.I. background check and his confirmation hearing.

Julie Roginsky, the co-founder, along with the former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, of Lift Our Voices, a nonprofit that fights against the silencing of victims of sexual misconduct, told me, “For senators not to allow a sexual-assault survivor to speak to them is unconscionable. She should be allowed to tell her story.” But a source who tried to broker one such meeting described the Republican senators as “just plain scared of Trump.” [Continue reading…]