District of Columbia (CNN.com)Rep. Mick Mulvaney is facing clean GOP opposition ahead of his confirmation vote this week as President Donald Trump’s budget manager, with a seasoned Senate Republican in private raising worries about a nomination that now hangs in the balance in the Senate.
Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, the chairperson of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is worried about Mulvaney’s perspectives about defense spending and is unsure whether he had be ready to to aid him, two sources familiar with the subject tell CNN.
In once, Arizona Sen. John McCain has railed against Mulvaney’s previous support for a smaller military budget, and a source familiar with his thinking states that he continues to have issues about Mulvaney forward of this week’s confirmation vote.
Whether there are just two GOP defections, it may drive Vice President Mike Pence to break a tie in the Senate, some thing Pence had to do previously when he broke a 50-50 tie for Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos to head the Education Department — the very first time a vice-president has damaged a Senate tie to get a Cabinet nominee ever.
But Mulvaney would be prevented by a GOP defection from obtaining the work. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she has not produced a “final decision” on Mulvaney but that the representative told her he’d handle budgets otherwise as manager of the White House Office of Management and Budget than he did as a House member from an old-fashioned South Carolina district.
“So I thought that was a good answer but I haven’t made a decision yet,” Collins said Tuesday. “But it was a good meeting.”
The Senate will vote Wednesday on whether to split a filibuster on the nomination, which demands many of senators, accompanied by with a confirmation vote planned for Thursday of Mulvaney.
Mulvaney, who’s a top person in the old-fashioned House Freedom Caucus, has previously railed against developing defense funds within his drive for drastically reducing national spending. That, in addition to his previous support for pulling straight back from military functions in Afghanistan, have prompted sharp strikes from defense hawks like McCain.
“Don’t you know where 9/11 came from?” Last month, mcCain lashed out at Mulvaney throughout his confirmation hearings. McCain finally consented in committee to permit Mulvaney’s nomination progress to the entire Senate, however he mentioned he warned he could vote against him about a floor and nonetheless harbored worries. A resource familiar using the senator’s believing says he is open on how he will vote and nonetheless h AS these worries.
Cochran hasn’t made a community assertion about his perspectives on Mulvaney, but resources say he shares perspectives similar to McCain’s. A spokesman that was Cochran, Chris Gallegos, declined to comment aside from to say the senator hasn’t yet declared his place on the nomination.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/14/politics/mick-mulvaney-budget-director-confirmation/index.html
