U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn) said on Friday he was worried Senate Republicans wouldn’t unanimously support President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.
Trump spent the remainder of 2024 rolling out his cabinet and staff selections for his incoming administration. Senate confirmation hearings and votes on the nominees are set to begin soon.
Tuberville said during an interview on Talk 99.5’s “Dixon & Vining” morning show on Friday that the lack of support for some of the nominees from Senate Republicans “worries me.”
“We're in an interesting time in our country. And as I've told everybody, not just the United States, but the state of Alabama, we've got lots of problems. And they've been caused by politicians over the years that kicked the can down the road. And now for some reason, in the last, what, 12 of the last 16 years, we've let radical politicians like Barack Obama and, and then of course, Joe Biden and whoever's running the White House, take this country over and pretty much just turn it upside down,” Tuberville told guest host Bryan Dawson. “Our country is just, we're, we're kind of like out in the ocean with no life preserver, just kind of splashing and trying to make it to the bank without drowning. Our country has huge problems. And again, it's all caused by either neglect or bad policies created in Washington, DC, not the states. The states have done a pretty good job of trying to overcome a lot of those things. But let me tell you, the next six months, once President Trump takes office, we get his people confirmed. It's going to be one of the most important times in the country's history that has not really been in war, like the Civil War or World War II or when Vietnam has been going on. We have got to take care of our domestic problems. And we have them. You just saw what happened in New Orleans with open borders. And everybody says, well, this has nothing to do with open borders. Yes, it does. It's got all to do with it because we have huge problems with immigration that have leaked in, that have taught a lot of these radical problems that we're having right now. Listen, I've got nothing against anybody. But you come to this country, you go by our Constitution, you go by our laws, you don't threaten other people. What happened the other night in New Orleans, and then you turn around and you have thousands of people marching the streets of New York, saying, ‘Death with America. We're going to overtake this country.’ They got to go. They’ve got to go home, wherever they're from. They’ve got to go to jail. We've got to take our country back.”
He continued, “It's going to be interesting. And we've got the votes if we can get the RINOs and the Republican side of the Senate to vote for Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, Pam Bondi. It just worries me. It worries me that we've got people up there in the Republican side of our delegation that think they know better than President Trump, you know. And as I tell them, I've told them to their face as a group or individually, the people of this country gave us a mandate to change what's been going on. And I said, y'all have been doing it one way and it hadn't been working. Now, let's give President Trump a chance with his staff and change this country back to a free, fair, constitutional republic that believes in God, that believes in education, that believes in closed borders, and let's bring this country back together.”
“But we've got four or five or six people now that I'm very, very concerned about. But you're talking to somebody right now that's getting ready to make huge headlines if they vote against these people, because I'm not going to put up with it. I'm going to call them out. I don't care who they are. I don't care if they got Republican by their name. It is wrong. President Trump should have his people. And if they don't do it, we need to do everything we can to get them out of office as soon as possible and get people in there that care about this country,” Tuberville added. “I'm not a Mike Johnson fan. I'll tell you that. But here's the deal. President Trump knows that he'll have anybody's going to have a hard time getting elected Speaker of the House with the few numbers they have. You know, Mike Johnson came in and said, ‘You put me in, I will not send the $60 billion Ukraine that the Democrats want.’ He gets elected and he did give them the $60 billion. So I like people to stand up for what they believe in. But President Trump knows in the House that he can work with Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson will basically do what he'll tell him to do. That's exactly what we need. Same thing with John Thune. I was not a John Thune fan. He has not been a leader before. He has not, to me, not stood up and said the things in front of our caucus that needs to be said. But he got elected and President Trump is going to have to work with him."
"And we're going to hold him accountable. We have to have people that have understanding that they're going to have to stand up to this propaganda media that they're getting ready to have to face every day. And don't worry about getting their feelings hurt or whatever. We’ve got to stand up and say, listen, whatever it takes to make this country strong again, I'm going to work with President Trump. So it's a new day. We're going to have new leadership. I finally saw John Thune say a few days ago, for some reason, he said it, everybody has got to vote for President Trump's nominees. Well, you should have said that a month and a half ago and looked all these RINOS in the eye and said, listen, I don't care who you are. If you think you're going to be a chairman of a committee, fine, but you're not going to be if you don't vote for President Trump's nominees. I mean, the leader can do that, but you can't worry about hurting people's feelings right now, Bryan. We can't do it. We can't waste the next six months of bickering and worrying about, oh, we're going to hurt somebody's feelings. They've been up here 30 years and we can't do it. We're not going to have enough time. We can't waste one day. When we start Monday, we better come out of the blocks and start swinging against these liberal socialists that want to change our country to something else because they're going to try to prolong."
"They're going to play four corners basketball. They're going to say, we're just going to let them fight amongst themselves. We're just going to get on the side and vote against everything they want to do. If we go along with that, the American people need to run our butts out of Washington, DC., all of us, because we're not going to have the country that you and I have had the chance to grow up in.”
To connect with the author of this story or to comment, email caleb.taylor@1819News.com.
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