Senate Republicans just keep rolling over for Trump

Most of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees are controversial, some are unqualified. But they are being confirmed by a GOP senate majority.

Incredibly, last week Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chair of the Senate’s health committee and a doctor, voted to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., infamous for opposing vaccines for children, to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

A source close to Cassidy told ABC News, “He needed something [conversations with Kennedy] to just let him feel comfortable enough that he wouldn’t be responsible for the death of children because of this.”

Deaths of children? That’s an awfully big reservation to get over with just talk, wouldn’t you say, senator? It is soul-numbing. But there is more.

Kennedy’s cousin, former U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, wrote a scathing letter ahead of his Senate confirmation hearings. She accused him of being a “predator” who led family members into drug addiction and of peddling dangerous conspiracy theories about vaccines.

RFK Jr.’s hearings were disastrous. He answered basic factual questions about Medicare incorrectly. He failed to address concerns about the financial motivations behind his vaccine skepticism — namely that he collected referral fees for plaintiffs he recruited to a law firm’s lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers.

And yet Cassidy voted to advance Kennedy.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) made a similar decision. A longtime champion of medical research and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), she voted to advance the nomination of a critic of science-based research out of committee.

But I will note that the last time she downplayed criticism to support Trump nominees, she later said she had been misled. In that case, Collins voted to confirm Trump’s two Supreme Court nominees, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, based on their assurances that they would protect abortion rights as the law of the land and a “precedent on precedent.” They did not, and that was the end of Roe v. Wade.

Senators Cassidy and Collins are not alone in numbing their minds as Trump tramples the conscience of the senators responsible for confirming Cabinet nominees.

The most chilling case, according to remarkable reporting by The Wall Street Journal, centered on Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Tillis told the former sister-in-law of Pete Hegseth, now confirmed as secretary of Defense, to trust him with damning information about the nominee. He pledged that if Danielle Hegseth put her name on a sworn statement, “it would carry weight, and potentially move three votes," including his own. The statement she produced made allegations of domestic abuse and heavy drinking. She signed the statement, she explained, at “significant personal sacrifice.”

Another North Carolinian who had worked with Hegseth texted Tillis “begging him to vote no on Hegseth,” according to the Journal. The text read: “As a veteran, as a defense contractor, as a sexual assault survivor and as your constituent, please sir! Praying you and other [Republicans] come forward.”

But Tillis faced political pressures. He is up for reelection in 2026 and may face a primary challenge from Trump’s supporters.

Even when three other Republicans voted against Hegseth, Tillis voted for his confirmation. That created a 50-50 tie that was decided by Vice President J.D. Vance’s vote to support Hegseth.

Similarly, Indiana Senator Todd Young — a combat veteran who had refused to support Trump in 2024 — expressed concerns about the nomination of former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to be director of National Intelligence. Elon Musk responded by launching an online pressure campaign against Young, calling him a “deep state puppet.”

The U.S. Senate’s advice and consent on Cabinet nominations is much more than just ceremonial. It is a critical part of the constitutional checks and balances the nation’s founders established to prevent the rise of a president with unchecked power — an autocrat.

In my nearly 50-year career as a Washington journalist I have seen senators defy their own party and their own president to oppose nominees for secretary of Defense (John Tower), U.N. ambassador (John Bolton) and the U.S. Supreme Court (Robert Bork and Harriet Miers). 

In each case, opposition from members of the president’s own party led to their rejection or withdrawal.

It takes only a few senators — vested with six-year terms to outlast presidential administrations — to take a stand. But fear of Trump’s control over volatile voters on social media and in the streets — even in the hallways of the Capitol, as we saw with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot —looms large. 

The political damage from the scandalous failure of Senate Republicans to advise against candidates who are not qualified — and in some cases weighed down with troubled personal histories — is a grant of invincibility to the nominees and the president who nominated them.

Yet as the Senate buckles and Trump claims a mandate for expansive presidential power over nominees and more, there is little political penalty. Rather, “the vast majority of Americans aren’t that interested,” as Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) told The Washington Post last week. 

The senator explained that when there is “so much to shout about people become numb.” 

The mind-numbed people include Senate Republicans.

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for these Eyes: the Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”