President-elect Donald J. Trump’s bid to stock his cabinet with combative loyalists is creating the first major test for the new Senate Republican majority, whose leaders must now decide how far they are willing to go to challenge nominees some of them regard as egregiously unfit.
The issue reared its head only hours after Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, won the post of majority leader. Mr. Trump then announced he was choosing Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who was under investigation, but never charged, over sexual misconduct with minors and illicit drug use, to be attorney general. The next day, Mr. Trump announced that he had chosen Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Lawmakers were already reeling at Mr. Trump’s plans to nominate the Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who has been accused of promoting Russian propaganda, as director of national intelligence.
Now Mr. Thune, who will officially assume his post in January, must balance the deep misgivings among his rank-and-file with Mr. Trump’s demands of fealty, and habit of punishing those who dare to cross him. The president-elect’s threat to use recess appointments to unilaterally install nominees who cannot clear the Senate otherwise has deepened the conundrum, holding out the possibility of a constitutional clash at the outset of Mr. Trump’s second term.
So far, Mr. Thune, who was elected over a challenger more closely aligned with Mr. Trump, has studiously avoided opining on any of the candidates. Many Republicans said they were inclined to defer to Mr. Trump on all but the most outrageous nominees — some of them naming Mr. Gaetz as beyond the pale. But some Republicans said a confrontation could be coming if Mr. Trump tried to go around the Senate to appoint a slew of unacceptable candidates through recess appointments.
“I think all but Gaetz are very doable — maybe not lovable, but doable,” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said in an interview conducted before Mr. Trump’s announcement about Mr. Kennedy.
But if Mr. Trump tried to undermine the Senate’s role by forcing the chamber into recess so that he could circumvent its vetting, “this is where we stop — this is the end of the bridge,” Mr. Cramer said. “Everything else I can get on board with. I can make the case for the rest.”
Democrats, most of whom are expected to oppose Mr. Trump’s nominees, said they were facing even more existential stakes given the Senate’s role, laid out in the Constitution, of evaluating and confirming presidential nominees.
“It’s certainly a test of whether they are going to provide any independent check on the president and his plans to weaponize the Department of Justice for political purposes,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said, adding: “If we just give up on confirmations because Trump asked, that’s the end of the Senate.”
Publicly, Mr. Thune and other Republican leaders have adopted a stance that has become a sort of mantra: Trust the confirmation process to sort everything out.
“We don’t know until we start the process, and that is what we intend to do with him and all the other potential nominees,” he told reporters on Thursday, when asked about Mr. Gaetz’s candidacy.
“The president’s going to make his appointments; we’re going to continue to look forward to them coming to the Senate, and have hearings, and get his cabinet in place,” said Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, who was elected on Wednesday to be the No. 2 leader in the next Congress.
But Republicans are split over how deeply the Senate ought to probe Mr. Trump’s picks — particularly Mr. Gaetz.
On Thursday, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said that he “wants to see everything” on Mr. Gaetz, including a pending House Ethics Committee report. The panel’s investigation of Mr. Gaetz effectively ended when he abruptly resigned from the House on Wednesday.
Mr. Cornyn said he would favor issuing a subpoena if the panel did not turn its unreleased report over to the Senate willingly.
“I don’t think any of us want to fly blind,” Mr. Cornyn said. “Part of this is to protect the president against information or surprises coming out later that he and his team weren’t aware of.”
That could also lead to a constitutional clash between the two houses of Congress.
“I would not like them to subpoena something from us,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.
Mr. Graham is one of the few G.O.P. senators who has spoken favorably about Mr. Gaetz’s nomination. On Thursday, he also signaled he would support Ms. Gabbard — even though he is a foreign policy hawk deeply critical of Russia, and Ms. Gabbard has a track record of promoting conspiracy theories backed by the Kremlin.
“We’ll see how she does, but I like her,” Mr. Graham said. “We have our disagreements.” He added: “I generally defer to presidential picks. I’ve done it in the past; I’ll probably do it again.”
Some Republicans were clearly struggling this week to muzzle their disdain for Mr. Trump’s choices.
“I think it would be responsible for me to learn more about each of these nominees with whom I am not particularly well acquainted,” Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, told reporters when asked about Ms. Gabbard. He then urged reporters to look at his social media feed, where he has praised many of Mr. Trump’s choices — but noticeably not Ms. Gabbard, Mr. Gaetz or Mr. Hegseth.
“He’s got his work cut out for him,” Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, said when asked about Mr. Hegseth potentially becoming defense secretary. Several senators have raised concerns that Mr. Hegseth’s lack of management experience could be a liability atop the behemoth Pentagon; Ms. Ernst was also thought to be on Mr. Trump’s shortlist for the job.
Many others appeared equally tortured as they tried to be diplomatic about Mr. Trump’s threats to circumvent the Senate with recess appointments.
Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who was outspoken on Wednesday about her shock at Mr. Gaetz’s appointment and her alarm at the possibility that Mr. Trump would go around the Senate to install him, adopted a more conciliatory tone by Thursday.
“There may be cases where the Democrats have proposed unreasonable roadblocks and are slow-walking nominees that are not controversial,” she told reporters. “In those cases, maybe you can make a justification for having recess appointments.”
But others warned that the responsibility for ensuring that confirmations proceed smoothly lay with Mr. Trump, not the Senate.
“If we get good candidates we will be able to move through the nominations process hopefully really readily and that’ll be good for the president,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska. “But when you put forward picks that are really going to generate controversy, and not just controversy on one side of the aisle, it is going to take longer.”
Senators seemed generally unprepared, however, for dealing with what might be a nuclear option for Mr. Trump: forcing the Senate to recess so that he can name unpopular nominees without getting them confirmed. Though the Constitution dictates that the Senate can offer advice and consent on nominees, it also gives the president authority to adjourn Congress if there is a disagreement between the two chambers about whether to adjourn.
Some professed ignorance about that part of Article II when asked whether they feared that Mr. Trump might exploit it.
“I don’t think he can do that,” Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, told reporters. “I have not heard that theory.”
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