Dem
47
GOP
53
Among the states with at least one current Democratic U.S. senator, here are the 10 with the closest results from the 2024 presidential election (the margin between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is in parentheses; negative numbers indicate states that Harris won):
Why do we mention this? Keep reading.
Once the inauguration was over yesterday, and the Capitol Rotunda had been cleared, the members of the Senate rolled up the sleeves on their shirts, and their hoodies, and got to work. It is customary to confirm at least a few Cabinet or Cabinet-level officers on Inauguration Day, with a particular emphasis on those folks whose jobs involve national security. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) had five potential votes lined up, but only one person was able to secure unanimous consent, and thus to be confirmed yesterday. That person, as you might guess, was Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is now officially Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He thus becomes the first member of Trump's second Cabinet.
And though there was only one confirmation, the Trump administration got some additional good news on that front yesterday. As expected, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to advance the nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense to the full Senate. The vote was entirely along party lines, 14-13. It is now a near-certainly that Hegseth will be confirmed. First, because nominees are almost never "rejected;" if they can't get confirmed, they are told behind the scenes to drop out. Second, because if Hegseth was going to be rejected, some of the Republican votes he would probably have to lose are members of the Armed Services Committee. Put another way, it's not probable he would go 14-0 with Armed Services Republicans, but 35-4 with the rest of the Republican conference.
If that is not enough, Trump also got a partial victory when the Senate approved the Laken Riley Act, 64-35. It's not exactly the same bill that the House approved, so there's a little more work to be done on Capitol Hill, but the legislation will undoubtedly end up on Trump's desk later this week, or early next week. Then it will go from a partial victory to a full victory.
As a reminder, the soon-to-be-law legislation requires the detention of undocumented immigrants who are accused of misdemeanor-level crimes. Although Laken Riley was killed by a person matching that description, the bill is not going to save many lives, since the vast majority of people who commit misdemeanors, whether undocumented immigrant or not, are not going to move on to committing murder. It's not especially different from passing a law that says that, for example, anyone who commits a misdemeanor while wearing blue jeans should be detained. You'll catch a few potential murderers, just by chance, but not very many, particularly as a percentage of the overall number of detainees. Meanwhile, by making it much easier to have undocumented immigrants jailed, the law encourages scapegoating, and creates a due process nightmare. It will certainly be challenged in court, though we have no idea how that might turn out.
So, who are the 12 Democrats who voted for the legislation? How about we list them by state, with reference to how close that state was in last year's presidential election?
Perhaps you notice that this bears a striking resemblance to the list above. It is improbable that the great majority of senators in purple states just so happen to have greater insight into immigration policy than the senators in the blue states. Similarly, one cannot argue that these are the states most affected by immigration, since non-border states like Virginia and Georgia are here, while border states like California and New Mexico are not.
No, it could not be more clear that, as we have written previously, many Democratic senators have decided they got killed on immigration in 2024, and that they will have to move to the right, at least in cases where their next reelection could be close. The only Democratic senators from the nine closest states who did NOT vote for the bill are Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Tim Kaine (D-VA) and the two Minnesotans. Maybe they feel confident that they can win reelection without pandering to xenophobia, or maybe they just have a different moral compass. (Z)