What does it mean when the United States Senate, that storied cooling saucer, that deliberative body George Washington apparently described using a beverage metaphor nobody can source, needs its Vice President to stroll in and break a tie so that a former weekend morning television host can be handed the keys to a three-quarter-trillion-dollar war machine? I am, as always, just asking.
I was at Eliza’s on Tuesday night — she does a small Tuesday supper now, six people, one roast chicken, a defensible Sancerre — and the conversation, as conversations do in this town, turned to the Hegseth vote before the salad plates came out. Seated across from me was a lobbyist I will only describe as bipartisan, who represents, let us say, companies that build things that fly and explode. He held his wineglass at a very specific angle and said, “Margaret, the thing you have to understand is that the job is mostly meetings.” I asked what the meetings were about. He said, “Other meetings.” I refilled his glass myself.
For three decades I have watched confirmation hearings, and I will tell you what I have learned: the Senate takes itself most seriously at precisely the moment it is about to do the least serious thing. The senators furrow. They invoke their fathers’ service. They ask a pointed question, accept a non-answer, and then thank the nominee for his candor. Candor, in Washington, is the word we use for the thing that did not happen.
Three Republicans had the stomach to vote no. Three. In a conference of fifty-three. And we are meant to treat this as a crisis of conscience, a rending of garments, a profile in something. Forgive me. When the floor of your courage is three, the ceiling of your party is wherever the nominee’s forehead ends up.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for longer than some senators have been sentient, called me Wednesday morning and said something I have not been able to shake. She said, “You know, we still have the confirmation files from the Stimsons and the Marshalls. I pulled one the other day just to look at it. The paper is heavier.” I asked her what she meant. She said, “I mean the paper is heavier, Margaret. That’s all I mean.” Judy is not a dramatic woman. When Judy tells you the paper used to be heavier, the paper used to be heavier.
Is it unfair to ask what, exactly, the Senate believes a Secretary of Defense is for? Is it unfair to note that the institution has, in living memory, rejected nominees for far less — a tax irregularity, a household employee, a poorly handled question about a beverage? We used to lose Cabinet picks over nannies. Now we confirm them over tiebreakers. Somewhere between those two sentences is the entire story of the last twenty years, and nobody in this city wants to read it aloud.
The defense of the nominee, from the people who bothered to mount one, was that he will be surrounded by professionals. This is always the defense. He will be surrounded by professionals. The generals will manage him. The deputies will manage him. The building, that Pentagon-shaped organism with its own circulatory system, will manage him. Ask yourself, gently, whether you find that reassuring or whether you find it the exact opposite of the constitutional arrangement you were taught in the ninth grade.
The bipartisan lobbyist, by the time we reached the cheese course, had grown philosophical. “Margaret,” he said, “the real scandal isn’t this nominee. The real scandal is that the last three nominees were also fine, and nobody can remember what any of them did.” I told him I found that deeply comforting, in the way a diagnosis is comforting. At least now we know what we have.
And here is the part where a more cautious columnist would reach for balance. Here is where I would note that every administration has had its controversial picks, that the Republic has survived worse, that the permanent bureaucracy is a ballast against mischief. I am not a more cautious columnist. I am a columnist who has watched the ballast get thinner every year, and who has noticed that the people most eager to reassure you about institutional resilience are usually the people being paid by the institutions to sound reassured.
The question I cannot stop asking is the one no one at Eliza’s table would touch, not even after the port: What is the confirmation process actually for, if it can be cleared by a man whose chief qualification is that he performed well on a couch next to a weather map? Not whether he will be good or bad. Not whether his critics are fair. What is the process for? Because a process that cannot filter anything out is not a filter. It is a ceremony.
Judy, before she hung up, said one more thing. She said the files from the tough confirmations — the ones that failed, the ones that barely passed — have a particular smell when you open the boxes. Cigarettes and carbon paper and something else she couldn’t name. I asked her what the files from this era will smell like, when some archivist opens them in 2085. She laughed, which Judy almost never does, and said, “Margaret, I don’t think they’ll open them.”
I keep thinking about that. I keep thinking about the boxes nobody opens, the hearings nobody rereads, the tiebreakers that get footnoted into oblivion because the next one is already on the calendar. A country that cannot be bothered to take its own confirmations seriously is a country that has quietly decided the stakes are low. And a country that has decided the stakes are low is, historically speaking, moments away from finding out they were not. I am, as I have always been, just asking.