While many of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees have faced intense scrutiny from Senate Democrats during their confirmation hearings, Rep. Elise Stefanik might be met with slightly more support, The Hill reported on Saturday.
The congresswoman from upstate New York made a name for herself last year when she led the charge against rampant antisemitism across college campuses grilling the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T. in April of 2024. Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill resigned following pressure as a result of the hearings.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., is one such Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that is open to Stefanik becoming the U.S. Representative to the United Nations, a pivot from her tension-filled confrontations with attorney general nominee Pam Bondi and Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth.
“She made it very clear that she was accessible and she wasn’t walking away from the United Nations,” Duckworth told the outlet adding, “I thought it was good she said she would engage with the U.N. and really take on the role.”
Democrats are generally more supportive of the U.N. as a flawed but necessary body to maintain global stability and serve as a counter voice to Russia and China. Stefanik’s openness with Senate Democrats has won her some initial, if cautionary, support. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., another member of the foreign relations panel, said his meeting with Stefanik was “good” and “substantial.”
“I’m nervous a little bit about how [Trump] would approach some of these international organizations. Can they be frustrating? Yes. But when the U.S. disengages, it gets worse, not better for us. So I’m nervous about that,” Kaine said.
Trump took on much of the U.N. during his first term, “withdrawing the United States from the UN Human Rights Council; cutting funding for UNRWA, the Palestinian Refugee organization; withholding funding for the World Health Organization and restricting support to UN entities the administration viewed as providing information or access on abortions,” the outlet noted.
Democrats may not share Trump’s antipathy to the body as a whole but one area they are mostly united with the GOP on is the overwhelming amount of anti-Israel sentiment at the U.N. “The U.N. has proven again and again that it is a cesspool of antisemitism that has completely turned against Israel in its darkest hour,” Stefanik wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner published in September.
Stefanik is scheduled to appear before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations at 10 a.m. Tuesday, the day after Trump's inauguration.
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