Taking part in her first Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., peppered former Fox News commentator and former Army National Guard officer Pete Hegseth as to whether he would reject any order given to him in violation of the law or the U.S. Constitution if he becomes secretary of the Defense Department.
“As secretary of Defense, you will be the one man standing in the breach should President (Donald) Trump give an illegal order,” Slotkin, a former assistant Defense Department secretary and CIA officer, said near the end of a 4½-hour-long Armed Service Committee hearing on Hegseth’s nomination. “I’m not saying he will. But if he does, you are going to be the guy who he calls to implement this order. Do you agree that there are some orders that can be given by the commander-in-chief that would violate the U.S. Constitution?”
Hegseth said he rejected the premise that Trump, who won the election last year and will be inaugurated next Monday, would give the military an unlawful order but eventually acknowledged that he would follow the law.
“Everything we do will be lawful and under the Constitution,” he said. But Hegseth — who was repeatedly questioned during the hearing about his qualifications to lead the nation’s armed forces as well as whether he supported a role for women in combat — demurred when asked whether he would hesitate to use the U.S. military domestically, including for law enforcement purposes, if ordered by the president.
Slotkin noted that Mark Esper, who was one of the Defense Department secretaries during Trump’s first term as president, believed it was a mistake to use military forces against unarmed protesters, and apologized for doing so, including outside the White House in mid-2020 during demonstrations against police violence after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Asking Hegseth whether he believed Esper was right to apologize or not, the nominee — who has said he was part of the National Guard deployed in the nation’s capital at the time — declined to say.
Trump has discussed using active duty military to secure the U.S. borders and remove immigrants in the country illegally. Asked by Slotkin, a three-term congresswoman who was elected to succeed former U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow in November and is one of three new members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, whether he has discussed plans to use the active military inside the U.S., Hegseth again declined to say, though he argued that help was needed at the border.
“Everything we do will be lawful and under the Constitution but I recognize that this (President Joe Biden’s) administration has abdicated its responsibility. President Trump is going to restore order at the border,” he said.
Earlier in the hearing, Democratic U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, Michigan’s senior senator who also serves on the committee, joined his colleagues who sharply questioned whether Hegseth — who had tours in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Iraq and Afghanistan, and who also served as an official with a couple of veterans advocacy groups — had the experience necessary to run a department with some 3 million personnel attached to it worldwide.
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Hegseth, who earlier in the hearing had called for enacting tougher standards for military personnel on active duty, acknowledged that the largest of those organizations he ran involved just over 100 people, as well as volunteers.
“You talk about standards,” Peters said, adding that he saw the Senate advise and consent role in helping to confirm a Defense Department secretary as akin to a board of directors hiring a chief executive officer to run a huge and complex organization. “I don’t think there’s a board of directors in America that would hire you as the CEO with the kind of experience you have on your resume.”
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“You talk about standards, you talk about raising… standards for the men and women who serve,” Peters continued. “Do you think the way to raise minimum standards of the people who serve us is to lower the standards for the secretary of Defense, that we have someone who has never managed an organization of more than 100 people? … I have real problems with that.”
Hegseth noted that the organizations he ran did have success and that Trump had tagged him to be secretary to shake up and improve the Defense Department. Throughout the hearing, he rejected concerns raised by Democrats about reports that he had previously appeared at work events intoxicated, been the target of claims he sexually harassed or abused women and had financially mismanaged organizations, citing signed letters of support on his behalf and claiming the attacks were part of an organized and anonymous “smear campaign.”
Hegseth also downplayed earlier comments made in a book he wrote and elsewhere questioning the role of women in the military, saying as long as they can meet the same physical standards demanded of men, they should be allowed to serve in the same roles.
The Armed Services Committee is expected to vote on Hegseth’s nomination as early as next Monday and with Republicans in the majority in the committee and the Senate as a whole, there is a strong chance he could be confirmed, though there are still questions about the final vote.
Contact Todd Spangler: tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@tsspangler
This story was updated to change a video.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan senators hit Trump’s defense nominee with questions