Revenge Is A Dish Best Served In Senate Confirmations

You know you're screwed when Senate Republicans are openly predicting that you'll never get Senate confirmation for a Trump regime immigration job, but that's where former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli finds himself this week.

Ken Cuccinelli has spent years attacking Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans. Now, it’s time for payback.

President Donald Trump wants Cuccinelli, who most recently led the anti-establishment Senate Conservatives Fund, to be director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. But there may be nobody in Washington whom McConnell and his allies would take more pleasure in defeating, and the bottom line is Cuccinelli has little chance of getting approved for the job, Republican senators said.

“He’s spent a fair amount of his career attacking Republicans in the Senate, so it strikes me as an odd position for him to put himself in to seek Senate confirmation,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who ran the GOP’s campaign arm for two election cycles. “It’s unlikely he’s going to be confirmed if he is nominated.”

Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate GOP’s chief vote-counter, called the bid “a long shot,” adding, “They’ll go forward with it or they won’t, but I will suspect he’ll have plenty of obstacles once he gets here.”

The nascent nomination fight is again pitting the president against his own party in Congress. Just this spring, because of strong and very public opposition from Senate Republicans, Trump yanked his two preferred picks for the Federal Reserve’s board of governors before they even had been formally nominated.

And immigration has been a particular sore spot: Every leadership position at the Department of Homeland Security related to immigration is filled only by people serving in an acting capacity — and White House officials are mulling the prospect of having Cuccinelli do the same.
Some senators are still hoping to persuade Trump not to formally nominate or appoint Cuccinelli, but if the president goes through with it, the former Virginia attorney general likely will be either rejected or blocked from a floor vote entirely.

White House officials said Cuccinelli, always spoiling for a fight, is enthusiastic about another clash with McConnell. In a statement for this story, Cuccinelli showed no signs of backing down.

“My focus right now is on achieving President Trump’s immigration goals. It would certainly be my hope that senators’ primary interest is in the accomplishment of policy rather than politics,” he said.

While it's definitely amusing to see the Cooch get what's coming to him, never forget that the real issue is that the Trump regime continues to create a massive immigration crisis that has already cost the lives of refugee children, and they don't care how many families and lives they destroy if it opens the door to using force to hunt down undocumented immigrants in the country and round them up for deportation or worse.

Cuccinelli is there to make sure this happens, and he's chomping at the bit to do so.