Democratic senators who voted for John Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security apparently feel bamboozled by his department's swift moves to ramp up deportation efforts, efforts which appear to be targeting longtime residents with greater aplomb than the "violent" undocumented residents Trump was supposedly intent on going after. That means that now that Kelly is abandoning the post for a new position as Trump's head babysitter, those senators are feeling much less charitable about going along with whatever new Trump sycophant will be announced for the position.
“There’s going to be an opportunity to recap what they’ve done and why they’ve done it and see if we can make it so that families aren’t torn apart,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), who backed Kelly’s nomination in the committee and the full Senate, told TPM Monday evening. [...]
“We should take a look at exactly what has happened as opposed to just the words people speak about their intentions. There was a lot of what happened in the confirmation hearings writ large that was about ‘who will speak truth to power’ and I think the time that has passed since that first wave of confirmations has given us the chance to really see whether people really speak truth to power and walk truth to power in terms of their actions,” said Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), the lone Democrat to vote against Kelly’s confirmation on the committee.
We can be absolutely assured that whomever Trump selects to next run the Department of Homeland Security will be a terrible, unacceptable pick. We know this because anyone willing to tie themselves to the Trump White House, Trump's xenophobic ranting, Trump's deportation obsession, and the Trump team's staggering managerial incompetence and multiple mounting scandals after six months of watching it happen is, by definition, a moron. Trump's absolute unwillingness to consider anyone but an unfailing suck-up also narrows the field. Nobody willing to object in even the most meager terms to the White House campaign of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-everything-else paranoia will be granted so much as an interview.
So whoever finally agrees to take on the job, the confirmation hearings on this one should be interesting.