Jeffries urges Senate GOP to serve as check on 'particularly out of control' president-elect

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called on Senate Republicans on Friday to act as a check on the incoming Trump administration — a response to a handful of controversial Cabinet nominations announced by the former president this week. 

Jeffries declined to weigh in specifically on President-elect Trump's list of picks, which includes two of Jeffries's former House colleagues: Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), nominated to become attorney general and director of national intelligence, respectively.

But he strongly suggested they, and other Trump selections, are unfit to command the agencies they’ve been tapped to lead, and he urged Senate Republicans — who will control the upper chamber next year — not to rubber-stamp the nominees out of a blind loyalty for the new Republican president.

“The Senate has a job,” Jeffries said during a press briefing in the Capitol. “They should focus — meaning the Senate Republicans — on being a separate and co-equal branch of government and serving as a check and balance on a particularly out-of-control, when it emerges, administration. That's their job.

“Advice and consent should mean something,” he continued. “It certainly doesn't mean rolling over and giving any administration — Democratic or Republican — what they want.”

The comments add to a storm of controversy surrounding Gaetz, Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist and prominent conspiracy theorist tapped by Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jeffries deflected several questions about the appropriateness of the Gaetz nomination in particular, perhaps the most controversial of Trump’s picks. The Florida Republican has a law degree but has never been a prosecutor and has been the subject of a months-long Ethics Committee investigation into allegations of illicit drug use and the sex trafficking of a minor — charges Gaetz adamantly denies. 

Jeffries is no fan of Trump loyalists such as Gaetz. But Friday, the Democratic leader — who’s all but certain to keep that title in the next Congress — said he’s not going to participate in the game of constantly reacting to each and every controversy coming out of the White House in Trump’s second term.

“Here's what I'm not going to do for the next two years and the next four years. I'm not going to deal with — it's Tulsi Gabbard one day. Then, an hour later, it's Matt Gaetz. Then, the next day, it's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And then [Trump] says something on X, or on Truth Social. And then the people connected to him are doing something outrageous,” Jeffries said. “No. That I'm not doing, because that's all a distraction.”

Wednesday's nomination of Gaetz was immediately followed by his resignation and sparked a maelstrom of controversy about whether the Ethics Committee should release its report on him. Gaetz leaving Congress removed him from the committee's jurisdiction, therefore ending its investigation, but it still has the power to publicize the findings, as Democrats — and some Senate Republicans — are urging. 

The Ethics Committee canceled a meeting on the topic that had been slated for Friday morning, leading to Democratic accusations that Republicans on the panel, led by Rep. Michael Guest (Miss.), were burying potentially damning findings in order to protect Trump’s attorney general pick — and avoid the wrath of the incoming president.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) only fueled those suspicions Friday, when he said he will “strongly request” the Ethics Committee not release its report. 

While Jeffries took pains to avoid that debate this week, he also made clear that he considers at least some of Trump’s Cabinet nominees to be unqualified. 

“[Is] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., by way of example, the best that America has to offer? … Are some of these nominations a real path forward to solving problems for everyday Americans?” he asked. “That's the question that I've been grappling with, that the American people are grappling with.

“And the answer should be clear."