The Senate has voted to confirm torturer Gina Haspel as CIA Director. Among the “yes” votes were six Democrats: Joe Donnelly (Indiana), Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota), Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Bill Nelson (Florida), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), and Mark Warner (Virginia). Since two Republicans voted against Haspel (Jeff Flake and Rand Paul), and John McCain was absent (and opposed her confirmation anyway), she only received 54 votes. In other words, had five of those six Democrats voted “no,” the vote to confirm would have failed.
Politico reports:
Perhaps more significantly, Democratic leaders, who must defend 10 seats this fall in states that Trump carried, freed centrist senators to vote as they wanted amid an intense GOP pressure campaign to confirm her. Haspel opponents point a finger at senior Democrats for that move.
“The decision by leadership and the caucus suggests they decided this was not the hill they wanted to die on, this was not the battle they wanted to fight,” ACLU national political director Faiz Shakir, a former aide to past Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, said in an interview. “And that’s unfortunate because it was a winnable fight.”
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that standing against torture is low on the priority list for the Senate Democratic leadership. When Republicans like Jeff Flake and Rand Paul are more strident opponents of torture than many Democrats, something has gone seriously wrong.
Note that the two blue-state Democrats who voted to confirm Haspel (Shaheen and Warner) are up for re-election in 2020.