The Senate voted along party lines on Monday to advance Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to be director of national intelligence, with all Republicans coalescing around the effort to move to a final floor vote despite past concerns about her qualifications and background. 

Every Democrat that was present voted against the motion to invoke cloture on Gabbard’s nomination, while 52 Republicans voted in favor, teeing up a final floor vote later this week. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) were both absent, making the final vote tally 52-46. 

A final vote on her confirmation can take place as soon as 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, unless Democrats agree to speed up the vote.

The unified GOP support for Gabbard marks a striking turnaround from just weeks ago, when she was seen as one of Trump’s most endangered nominees, with multiple Republicans publicly skeptical of her nomination due to her controversial views on a range of issues.

Gabbard has faced a rocky confirmation process over her support for government leaker Edward Snowden and refusal to call him a traitor, her longstanding opposition to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, her 2017 visit to Syria as a member of Congress and subsequent support for then-Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and her past opposition to the Trump administration’s hawkish Iran policy, among other issues.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who was viewed as a key swing vote on the Gabbard nomination, announced after the cloture vote that she would vote to confirm Gabbard to the DNI post.

“I will vote to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. While I continue to have concerns about certain positions she has previously taken, I appreciate her commitment to rein in the outsized scope of the agency, while still enabling the ODNI to continue its essential function in upholding national security,” Murkowski wrote on X. “As she brings independent thinking and necessary oversight to her new role, I am counting on her to ensure the safety and civil liberties of American citizens remain rigorously protected.”

Monday’s cloture vote comes less than a week after the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced Gabbard’s nomination to the full Senate in a party-line vote. Gabbard won the support of several skeptical senators on the GOP side ahead of that vote, including Sens. James Lankford (R-OK), Susan Collins (R-ME), Todd Young (R-IN) and Mike Rounds (R-SD). 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) called Gabbard a “patriot” who “believes strongly in the mission with which she’ll be tasked: keeping America safe” and praised her commitment to eliminating inefficiencies within what he described as a bloated department.

“The intelligence community needs to refocus on its core mission, collecting intelligence and providing unbiased analysis of that information,” Thune said, later adding, “I’m glad that Ms. Gabbard plans to focus on identifying and eliminating redundancies and inefficiencies to restore the office to what it was originally designed to do.”