Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be U.S Secretary of State, could be the first cabinet appointee to be voted down by a concerned Senate committee in more than seven decades. The controversial past that continues to haunt Mr. Pompeo includes a Congressional campaign with racist undertones that he oversaw in 2010 against his Indian American opponent Raj Goyle in Kansas.
All 10 Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Republican Rand Paul are likely to vote against Mr. Pompeo on Monday. That will be a majority against his nomination in the Committee. If the Committee sends his name to the full Senate, he could be facing a close vote there too. Senators cite Mr. Pompeo’s extreme right views on social and international issues that are in close alignment with Mr. Trump’s own views to oppose his nomination.
Controversial past
Indian American political activists involved in Mr. Goyle’s 2010 campaign recall that the tone and tenor of Mr. Pompeo left them “hurt and disturbed.”
“That campaign left us all with some bad memories,” an Indian American Democrat who later went on to serve in a senior position in the Barack Obama administration, told The Hindu . The person did not want to identified.
While many strands of Mr. Pompeo’s 2010 campaign had deniability because they were expressed not by people formally aligned with the candidate, there was at least one incident that clearly and formally linked to the campaign. Mr. Pompeo, a Tea Party Republican who has expressed extreme and controversial views in the past, has said those would not be guiding his role as the Secretary of State. Democrats and activists are not convinced.
A letter to Senators from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights on April 5, cited the 2010 campaign. “In 2010, Mr. Pompeo ran on a disturbing exclusionary message. His opponent was a natural-born American citizen of Indian descent. Yet, when billboards appeared in the district urging the people to “Vote American, Vote Pompeo,” and “True Americans Vote for Pompeo,” he refused to condemn the messages. This occurred on the heels of an incident in which this campaign had shared a link to an article calling his opponent a “turban topper” who “could be a Muslim, Hindu, a Buddhist etc who knows. Mr. Pompeo claimed the action was a mistake and apologized, but his record as a Congressman showed that he continued to harbour animus towards Muslim Americans,” the letter said.
“A paid campaign staff member of the campaign, as opposed to a volunteer, tweeted out a racist slur. That's unfortunately a reflection of a misguided culture within the campaign. And that staff member was not dismissed,” Mr. Goyle told The Hindu.
‘Did little to assuage concerns’
Ranking Democrat on the Committee, Bob Menendez said last week that Mr. Pompeo “did little to assuage my concerns about the administration's deafening lack of strategic vision for any of our major global challenges.”
“This is one of the most challenging jobs in the world, diplomatically. I don’t think his record suggests that he has much regard for diplomacy. India-U.S relations have typically been a point of bipartisan emphasis, through several presidencies now, Republican and Democrats, and let's hope that continues,” Mr. Goyle said.
Republicans have a narrow majority of 51-49 in Senate. But with Mr. Paul firmly opposed and Senator John McCain absent due to illness, Mr. Pompeo has no more than 49 Republican votes. One Democrat Senator, Heidi Heitkamp, is likely to vote for him. If the numbers hold that way, he could be confirmed by the full Senate.
