What insiders expect from Ash Carter's hearing
A candidate for Senate confirmation can have many advantages â familiarity with Congress, issue expertise and long service in the public arena â but that doesnât mean Ash Carterâs confirmation hearing will be a walk in the park. Just ask Chuck Hagel. Story Continued Below For many in Washington, from the White House on down, the outgoing defense secretary never fully overcame a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing in which he struggled to describe the Obama administrationâs positions, walked back some of his previous statements and explained his views on complex issues. At the time, some committee members said it was the worst confirmation hearing theyâd ever seen. The man President Barack Obama has nominated to replace Hagel is a former deputy defense secretary who is deeply familiar with Congress and the complexity of myriad defense issues â and has worked both in the public and academic arenas. Although his aides are careful not to criticize Hagel or his hearing, they made clear Carter wants to be ready. âDr. Carter has met and continues to meet with senators on the SASC prior to his confirmation hearing on Wednesday,â said one senior defense official involved with the confirmation. âOutside of his Hill meetings, Dr. Carter has met numerous current and former DOD officials related to a variety of issues relevant to the Pentagon.â Specific areas of preparation include the fiscal 2016 budget due out Monday â which Carter, and not Hagel, is set to formally present to the committee â as well as the war in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Some of the defense veterans helping Carter with his transition include Arnold Punaro, a former Marine major general and Senate Armed Services Committee staff director who now heads the National Defense Industrial Association, and Army Maj. Gen. Ron Lewis, its chief of public affairs. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Mike Lumpkin is heading up Carterâs transition team. One key strategy is Hill time. Carter has been methodically checking off Armed Services Committee members from Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and ranking member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to newcomers such as Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). So far, the sessions appear to have been going well; several senators or their staff members have hailed Carterâs qualifications. âHeâs a pro,â Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told POLITICO. âHe knows the building well.â And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said there was no question Carter would fare better than Hagel. âThe bar is low,â Graham said. McCain even gave Carter a special shoutout at a hearing on Wednesday to warn about the dangers of sequestration. The automatic, across-the-board budget restrictions due to return next fiscal year, unless Congress acts, are not because of an âemergency or a recessionâ or because theyâre âthe answer to our nationâs fiscal challenge,â as McCain quoted Carter saying at an earlier hearing. âItâs not because paths of revenue growth and entitlement spending have been explored and exhausted. Itâs purely the collateral damage of political gridlock,â Carter had said. McCain seems certain to ask Carter to condemn sequestration again in those kinds of terms. And committee members will also be listening for at least two other key points, said Kathleen Hicks, a former principal deputy undersecretary of defense whoâs now a senior vice president with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. First, âthat [Carter] is committed to a real relationship with Congress and that he will do his part to try to overcome the partisanship that is dividing Washington,â Hicks said. He âwill expect them to do the same, particularly in order to lift sequestration and get to sensible solutions for defense,â she said. Second, Hicks said, âthat he will always provide his honest and unflinching counsel to the president and will advocate for the chiefs and the chairman to do the same.â Carterâs independence as secretary could be a major issue. Republicans have said they want the confirmation hearing to be less about the nominee and more about the presidentâs shortcomings, as critics call them, on national security crises around the world. Between those crises and the widely discussed âmicromanagementâ of the Pentagon by Obama and his White House national security team, conservatives have portrayed Hagel, and more recently Carter, as victims to be pitied. Panel members at the conservative Heritage Foundation recently called it âbafflingâ that Carter would even want the job. So Carterâs team has reason to be optimistic that heâll get a better reception than Hagel did. âHeâs clearly already gotten these endorsements from Sen. McCain and a bunch of other folks on SASC, and I expect heâll basically breeze through,â said Shawn Brimley, a former top National Security Council staffer whoâs now a vice president with the Center for a New American Security. But one challenge will be for Carter to signal to the committee, the Pentagon and the defense establishment where he wants to focus during the last two years of the Obama administration. âIf heâs going to make a real impact on the defense budget, on procurement, on platforms, on priorities, heâs got to do it in the next 12 months â and heâs very well aware of that,â Brimley said. Carter must make decisions on the Air Forceâs new Long-Range Strike Bomber, the Navyâs drone program and its replacement for the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, Brimley said â so people will be listening closely to the nominee during his confirmation hearing for clues about how he might act on them or what other priorities he could set. Another reason for optimism by Carterâs team is the political climate. A quirk of the calendar meant Hagelâs nomination process took place just after Republicans scored a big political victory by blocking Obamaâs choice of Susan Rice to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. The atmosphere in Washington was even more poisonous than usual, and the White House wanted to show it was not cowed and pushed the guy it wanted. Republicans welcomed another knife fight and the chance to damage another nominee. That created a difficult climate for anyone, but Hagel did not do enough to help himself, as one former senior defense official told POLITICO. âI think he was expecting a cakewalk, and he actually walked into a bloodbath,â the former official said. The former official, who asked not to be identified, said Hagel was offered several opportunities to face a âmurder board,â but he said, ââI donât need to do this â Iâm a former senator. I wonât have a problem.ââ Instead, as it happened, âHagel was one misstep away from not getting confirmed. In the end he got confirmed, but it was a straight party-line vote â it was not a rousing endorsement. So he started on a difficult foot.â In the end, Hagel was confirmed by the Senate nearly two years ago, 58-41, with four Republicans supporting him. Hagel eventually won over some members of Congress with whom he first struggled. But he could not resist a joke about his dealings with Congress on Wednesday at a âfarewellâ ceremony attended by the president, Vice President Joe Biden and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey. âIâve been very fortunate to have you as my partner in this job,â Hagel told Dempsey, âespecially during those self-help and educational opportunities called congressional hearings.â