Thune on controversial Trump nominees: ‘None of this is gonna be easy’

Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) says that President-elect Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks face difficult paths to confirmation in the Senate, warning, “None of this is gonna be easy.”

Thune acknowledged during a Thursday evening interview with Fox News’s "Special Report with Bret Baier" that a few Republican senators are likely to oppose former-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Trump’s choice to head the Department of Justice, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

And Thune cautioned that it won’t be so easy to recess the Senate for more than 10 days to allow Trump to circumvent bipartisan opposition to his nominees by making recess appointments.

“It’s an option,” he said of closing down the Senate for 10 days or longer, the standard the Supreme Court set for making recess appointments.

But he warned that he may not be able to get enough votes to do that.

“You have to have all Republicans vote to recess, as well. So the same Republicans … that might have a problem voting for somebody under regular order probably also has a problem voting to put the Senate in the recess,” he said, adding that the GOP-controlled House would also have to enter into an extended recess.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is one GOP colleague who has said she doesn’t want the Senate to abdicate its constitutional duty to provide “advice and consent” on Trump’s nominees.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), another swing Republican vote, said she was “shocked” to learn Trump had tapped Gaetz, who was previously embroiled in a sex trafficking investigation by the Justice Department, to head the Justice Department.

Thune pledged that while “the Senate will perform its constitutional role under advice and consent,” “we’re not going to allow the Democrats to thwart the will of the American people.”

On the prospect of confirming Gaetz to serve as Trump’s attorney general, Thune said the Senate Judiciary Committee would likely first review the House Ethics Committee investigation of the Florida lawmaker.

Gaetz resigned from Congress this week in a move that appeared designed to quickly end the Ethics panel’s probe of alleged sexual misconduct and illicit drug use but Thune said its findings are likely to be made available to senators.

“My guess is at some point it’s out there,” he said of the Ethics Committee’s report. “These confirmation hearings, they are fairly comprehensive in terms of the vetting process that nominees go through.

“I think we’ll have to say but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of that happening,” Thune said when asked if the findings of the Ethics probe would “factor” into Gaetz’s confirmation process.

“None of this is gonna be easy, but again President Trump had a huge mandate from the American people. Not only the popular vote, the electoral vote. They were historic. The people in this country want change,” he said. “I always believe that you defer to a president when it comes to the people they want in their Cabinet.

“But obviously there is a process whereby we get down and scrub all these nominees and figure out whether or not, one, are they qualified and are they people fit to hold these offices,” he said.

Updated at 9:51 a.m. EST