The strange, shifting battle lines.
On Friday, January 24, the US Senate voted to confirm Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of Defense in a 50-50 nail-biter. Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote, marking only the second time in history that the President of the Senate has had to do so for a cabinet official. Hegseth, one of Donald Trump’s most controversial nominations, was under a barrage of negative media coverage. The vote was as close as mathematically possible, but did it signal the end of the upper chamber resistance effort?
GOP Fault Lines
Three Republican senators refused to back Hegseth: Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins of Maine. Murkowski and Collins had already signaled they would vote nay on the confirmation, leaving the former Senate minority leader the only…
