Hegseth Faces the Senate

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Trump's pick to be defense secretary Pete Hegseth | Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom

Will Hegseth get through? Pete Hegseth, current Fox News anchor and possible future defense secretary in the Trump administration, will face senators in his confirmation hearing later today.

“Hegseth is a decorated combat veteran who was deployed in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan,” reports CNN. “He has earned two Bronze Star Medals for his service in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Since 2014, he’s worked for Fox.

Hegseth has come under plenty of scrutiny for his string of divorces, salacious details of his personal life, and even a sexual assault allegation. These things, and his general inexperience—that might give one pause as to whether he can lead an $800 billion department and 3 million employees—might tank his confirmation.

As for the purported assault: “Hegseth was accused by a woman of sexually assaulting her in October 2017 following a speaking engagement at a conference held by a Republican women’s group in Monterey, California,” reports CNN. “According to a police report obtained by CNN, the woman told police that Hegseth physically blocked her from leaving a hotel room, took her phone and then sexually assaulted her even though she ‘remembered saying “no” a lot.’ Hegseth told police that their encounter was consensual and that he had repeatedly made sure the woman ‘was comfortable with what was going on between the two of them.'” Hegseth was never charged with any crime, and during the #MeToo years, he paid the woman some settlement money for her to keep quiet about this, ostensibly fearing the allegations would tank his career.

He’s been married and divorced several times, conceiving a child with a Fox producer while still married. (Affairs also reportedly led to his first divorce, as well as his second.) His mother, during the proceedings for his second divorce, wrote an email to him later made public by the press, including sentences such as “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.” She later disavowed this, noting that she’d scribbled down such words in a moment of rage.

As for his actual views, they’re basically what you’d expect from a Donald Trump pick. Hegseth has called the United Nations “a fully globalist organization that aggressively advances an anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-freedom agenda. Here’s one set of rules for the United States and Israel, another for everyone else.”

“Nato is not an alliance; it’s a defense arrangement for Europe, paid for and underwritten by the United States,” he wrote in his 2020 book, American Crusade. “Europe has already allowed itself to be invaded. It chose not to rebuild its militaries, happily suckling off the teat of America’s willingness to actually fight and win wars.” (More excerpts from The Guardian.)

Some senators, like Iowa Republican Joni Ernst, have telegraphed their skepticism of Hegseth from a character standpoint. Others are concerned that he’s “never made national-security policy, served in a senior military role, worked in defense acquisition, or led an organization larger than a nonprofit advocacy group,” as Defense One puts it. At the same time, some of the media-class condemnation of Hegseth is a bit overheated and sensationalist, with one Politico headline reading “Pete Hegseth’s Crusade to Turn the Military into a Christian Weapon,” a reference to American Crusade. (The Politico piece goes on to speak critically of the church Hegseth is a member of, the religious beliefs he professes, and the lead pastor there, Doug Wilson.)

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the issue is that Hegseth would turn the military into a “Christian weapon”; I think it’s that this is a department with a massive budget and a huge number of personnel. Someone with a bit more experience at leading such an organization (or…slashing such organizations…) would be a better pick than this neocon-turned-MAGA TV news commentator who’s been spending an awful lot of time on the front lines of the culture war.

Scenes from New York: Brad Lander, the mayoral candidate currently serving as city comptroller, appears to be crafting an entire campaign around taking threats to public safety seriously and ending homelessness. He wants to expand subway outreach teams, get homeless people out of the train cars and into social services that could help them, and utilize a “housing first” model. “The plan would cost about $100 million in the first year, and roughly $30 million per year thereafter, with about half going toward renovating vacant single-occupancy apartments that would provide an array of on-site services,” reports The New York Times. My question for him is: Where is the existing $4 billion we spend on homeless services going? Why do we need to shell out an additional $100 million to see real progress on this issue? And will a “housing first” approach actually serve to get people clean, in cases of drug addiction, or sufficiently treated, in cases of mental illness?

QUICK HITS

  • Please subscribe to Just Asking Questions! This week’s episode will be with The Unspeakable‘s Meghan Daum, who just lost her house in the Altadena fire.
  • What will happen to the many, many Los Angeles residents whose wealth was tied up in their now-destroyed homes? The Wall Street Journal reports.
  • Now that Donald Trump is about to be back in office, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is going from airing her show once a week to…daily! Just what we needed. What would we do without her!
  • “The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission must now thoroughly ‘explain itself’ for refusing to grant Coinbase’s formal request that the agency write regulations for how the industry should assess whether crypto assets are securities or not, according to a circuit-court ruling on Monday,” reports CoinDesk. “A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in a legal rebuke of the securities regulator, partially sided with Coinbase’s effort to get the agency to offer legal clarity by writing crypto regulations.”
  • This is probably a good thing:
  • Once again for the people in the back: Prices convey useful information about how much supply is available. When you crack down on so-called “price gouging,” you make it harder for people to receive that information. Price controls are bad!
  • First Mark Zuckerberg, now Paul Graham….The tide is turning.
  • As I was saying…

The post Hegseth Faces the Senate appeared first on Reason.com.

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