Daily Kickoff
Good Thursday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we look at the approach taken by freshman Rep. Sarah Elfreth, who was championed by AIPAC in her primary, to Israel and Jewish communal issues in her first months on Capitol Hill, and report on frustrations among Senate Republicans over the delay in moving forward on Rep. Elise Stefanik’s confirmation to be U.N. ambassador. We cover former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s comments to Dan Senor about Israel’s Hezbollah strategy, and report on Tampa Democrats’ decision to suspend an official with a history of making antisemitic comments. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Mike Huckabee, Scarlett Johansson and Alex Lasry.
What We’re Watching
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio is heading to Germany today for the annual Munich Security Conference, which kicks off tomorrow. He’ll travel to Israel on Sunday, followed by stops in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
- Also slated to attend the conference, in addition to Vice President J.D. Vance, are close to two dozen senators — but their attendance is in limbo, awaiting the green light from Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), who may opt to keep the legislators in Washington on Friday for votes on Trump administration nominees.
- Concerns about security in Munich are running high ahead of the start of the summit, deepened by a car-ramming attack in the city earlier today in which 20 people were injured.
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is in Ukraine today for meetings with senior officials. Last night, he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Washington today, and will meet with President Donald Trump this afternoon.
- The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing today for Linda McMahon, the Trump administration’s nominee to head the Department of Education. McMahon’s confirmation hearing comes a day after Trump told reporters he’d like for the department “to be closed immediately.”
- The Senate Judiciary Committee is slated to hold a vote today on advancing the nomination of Kash Patel to be the director of the FBI, while the full Senate is expected to vote this morning on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be secretary of health and human services.
- The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding a hearing on navigating a post-Assad Syria. Speakers include Michael Singh and Dana Stroul, respectively the managing director and director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
- We’re also keeping an eye on this weekend’s planned hostage release in Gaza, following reports this morning that Israel walked back its demand that Hamas release all of the remaining 76 hostages in Gaza. Israeli media reported earlier today that Jerusalem communicated to Hamas officials that the cease-fire would hold if Hamas released three hostages this weekend, as had been agreed on last month. Earlier this week, Hamas threatened to cancel the release, alleging Israeli violations, prompting President Donald Trump, followed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to demand that Hamas release all the hostages in the enclave by this weekend. Hamas said earlier today that it intends to release three hostages on Saturday, in line with the cease-fire agreement reached last month.
What You Should Know
Vice President J.D. Vance, in his effort to persuade skeptical conservatives of the merits of confirming decidedly non-conservative Cabinet nominees such as Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., invoked a notable argument last week, Jewish Insider Editor-in-Chief Josh Kraushaar writes.
Vance made the case that senators must confirm these controversial nominees because they’re now part of the Trump coalition. Even if these former left-wing Democrats don’t have long-standing GOP credentials, the faction of disillusioned former Democrats and independents played a key role in President Donald Trump’s victory — and in Vance’s view, the president is obliged to reward his allies with plum administration posts.
Vance’s push worked. On Wednesday, Gabbard was confirmed as director of national intelligence, with all but one Republican (former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) voting for her confirmation. And Kennedy is on track to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with the Senate agreeing to advance his nomination to the Senate floor on a party-line vote.
It’s worth taking Vance’s comments about the changing GOP coalition seriously. On one hand, Trump’s 2024 victory was boosted by the endorsement of Kennedy and other like-minded Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) activists, who had previously found themselves on the left side of the aisle. Gabbard’s anti-establishment foreign policy views appealed to disaffected voters who preferred the president focus his attention at home more than abroad, a potentially decisive constituency in the last election.
On the other hand, in the two-party American political system, there’s no requirement that every ideological faction is represented in a Cabinet. Unlike in multiparty parliamentary democracies, where the leading party often needs to forge a coalition government with other like-minded partners, Trump has free rein to appoint whomever he sees fit to serve him, as long as they can win Senate approval.
As significant, Trump doesn’t have to worry about elements of his coalition forcing him out of office, as often happens in parliamentary democracies. Just look at Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is always attuned on catering to his right flank and Haredi coalition partners to prevent his government from collapsing.
But considering the analogy more, it seems that with these picks, Trump is accommodating a growing group of voters with a deep public antipathy towards elites and institutions. If the U.S. democratic system is supposed to be reflective of the public sentiment, Gabbard and Kennedy’s ascension is small-d democracy in its purest form.
Indeed, GOP senators who decided to back Gabbard and Kennedy despite ample reservations are doing so in response to public pressure. Some skeptical senators claim to have received commitments that they won’t be letting their controversial personal views impact their policy. Others claim their roles will be constrained in the administration by more established officials.
They’ve taken heat for too easily falling in line for Trump rather than performing their advise-and-consent duties.
But they’re also responding to a shifting public mood that is increasingly embracing conspiratorial views once well outside the political mainstream. We’re now past a tipping point that will be hard to come back from.
early reservations
Is AIPAC’s big bet on Sarah Elfreth paying off?
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As the legislative session nears its third month on Capitol Hill, the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, whose political arm spent heavily to propel several freshman Democrats to office, is now voicing some early reservations with one new lawmaker who was among the top recipients of its largesse last election cycle. Rep. Sarah Elfreth (D-MD), a former state senator from Maryland, won her seat in Congress after she had clinched the nomination in a crowded primary where her campaign was fueled by more than $4.2 million in outside support from AIPAC’s super PAC, marking one of its largest investments of the 2024 election season. Days into her first term, however, Elfreth broke with AIPAC in voting against legislation — which passed the House with bipartisan support — that would impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.
AIPAC reaction: Even as the bill faced opposition from a range of House Democrats, including pro-Israel stalwarts frequently aligned with AIPAC, a spokesperson for the group on Tuesday expressed dissatisfaction with Elfreth’s decision, which carried added significance as the first Middle East policy test for newly elected members of Congress. “Pro-Israel activists are disappointed by Rep. Elfreth’s vote against the ICC bill and have conveyed to the congresswoman how important this issue is to our community,” Marshall Wittmann, an AIPAC spokesperson, said in a statement to JI. “Rep. Elfreth has committed to building a strong pro-Israel voting record, and we are continuing to work with her to ensure this vote was an isolated exception.”
Notable: Harry Dunn, a nationally recognized former Capitol Police officer, who ran against Elfreth in last year’s primary, is now “strongly considering” mounting a campaign to succeed Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) if the 85-year-old congressman chooses to retire at the end of his current term, according to a Jewish leader who has spoken with Dunn about his plans and asked to remain anonymous to discuss a private conversation.