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Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor to join many of my colleagues in expressing grave alarm over the choice of Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense.

It is not hyperbole to say that we have never seen a candidate--at least in modern times--to lead our soldiers and our troops who is as dangerously and woefully unqualified as Pete Hegseth.

I think everybody understands his primary qualification. He was on TV during the weekends, when Donald Trump would watch FOX News--period, stop--because as we have learned more about Pete Hegseth--his history of sexual misconduct, his history of public drunkenness, his history of financial mismanagement--it appears as if there must be thousands of other people who were easily more qualified.

But I want to talk today about his qualifications, his views that he has made known on television, that he has expressed to the committee about how he would do the job.

I think his history of personal misconduct, in and of itself, is disqualifying. It is just an embarrassment to the country, at a moment when we want to win more friends and allies. It is just the wrong match for a Department that oversees the moral and professional development of young men and women to have somebody like that, with that kind of history, leading the Agency.

But it is also important on the views that he has expressed on how he would run the Department of Defense, because I fear he will run it into the ground.

First, let me talk about the politicization of the Department of Defense. Listen, I don't like the fact that all across government, the design seems to be that if you don't agree with President Trump's political ideas, that if you don't pledge loyalty to President Trump, you don't have any future in the Federal Government. That is not how we have ever run the Federal Government.

Yes, we have always had a class of political appointees. Yes, you want the people at the very top of each Department to be broadly aligned with your view of the world. But this administration--most recently, by reclassifying thousands of employees in the Federal Government to make them political, to make them immediately fireable-- is a fundamental rewrite of the way that we traditionally view government.

We want civil servants, people whose oath, whose loyalty, is to the American public, is to the Constitution, is to the law, not simply to a political party or to a political ideology.

Kash Patel has made it very clear. He doesn't want anybody in the Department of Justice who doesn't line up with his particular political view of the world. And Pete Hegseth seems to be of the same mind.

He seems to be proposing creating a Department of Defense that abandons its core values and its traditional review processes in favor of a new culture of paranoia and mistrust, amidst unexplained firings for even being perceived as having the wrong political leanings.

Now, this didn't happen inside the Department of Defense, but it is the highest profile firing in the national security chain of command. On Monday--on Trump's first day in office--he fired the head of the Coast Guard, Commandant Linda Fagan, without explanation beyond anonymous statements to the press about vague concerns about Fagan's approach to programs aimed at improving diversity or opportunity within the Coast Guard.

Many of us have had the opportunity to work with Admiral Fagan. She is a straight shooter. She improved morale at the Coast Guard. She has vigorously defended our shores. She has helped increase readiness. There is nothing political--there was nothing political--about Linda Fagan in her career of service to this country to become the first woman to lead the Coast Guard.

Yet she was fired on Monday without explanation, except for these anonymously sourced, vague concerns about her focus on trying to bring more women into the Coast Guard and more cadets of color. It seems to serve a very clear end: to make everybody wonder what that line is.

Nobody knows the line that Linda Fagan crossed, but now that it is blurred, everybody is going to hunker down, buckle down, do nothing at all that may arise the suspicions of the White House.

It seems to me that that is exactly what is going to happen at the Department of Defense. He has promised to fire top-end military leaders who are engaged in his nebulous war on woke.

So if you care about making sure that you have got troops from different backgrounds and different parts of the country, maybe that is a war on woke. If you promote a woman, maybe that is a war on woke. If you care about making sure that your troops don't engage in unethical conduct, maybe that is a war on woke. If you contract with a local business that may not be aligned with Donald Trump, maybe that is part of the war on woke.

We have no idea. And so what will happen inside the Department of Defense is just a constant sense of paranoia, a constant looking over your shoulder, a grinding to a halt of business as normal because nobody knows what is a fireable offense and what isn't.

How do I stay on the good side of Pete Hegseth? What gets me on the bad side?

Second, I want to talk about his views on women in combat. He wrote this in his book:

Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.

What an insulting thing to say. What a disgusting thing to believe.

``Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes.'' My mom taught me to take risks. My dad told me to take risks too. But is there a single U.S. Senator here who believes that our mothers, the women in our lives, aren't risk takers, that they didn't push us to be better?

Pete Hegseth believes--he just believes this--that women hold us back, that women hold men back, that women hold their sons back. And it just doesn't matter that he has walked back these statements. Magically, he had a conversion on the issue of women in the military. Magically, he started saying less offensive things about women right after he was nominated to be Secretary of Defense.

Nobody believes this conversion. This is a conversion for political reasons only. It does not mask the fact that this is what Pete Hegseth believes, that he believes that women are inferior to men--and again, not just that they shouldn't engage in combat; he believes that they are morally inferior, that they have qualities that men don't have.

Many women--most women that I know--who have served bravely and effectively in combat--some serving with us on Capitol Hill--have taken grave offense to Pete Hegseth's unfounded denigration of their service. Many have pointed out the real impacts his ideas will have surrounding women in combat and what those comments could mean for our more general readiness. Why? Because there are 360,000 women serving in the U.S. military today in a variety of capacities. They are essential to keeping this Nation safe. Now every single one of them knows that the man taking over the Department of Defense doesn't think they are worthy to serve and that their prospects for advancement upon his elevation to the Department of Defense are compromised.

Their ability to get fair treatment inside the Department of Defense has been compromised, and it won't shock anybody if we see many of those women leave the service and if we see many fewer women sign up to protect this country. That would come at an enormous cost--an enormous cost--to the security of this Nation.

Third, I want to talk about a topic that I hope this body finds a way to have a nonpolitical, nonpartisan discussion on, and that is the growing problem of extremism in our military.

Now, I think every large organization has to tackle this issue. Anytime you have a big, large organization, you are going to have individuals amongst your ranks that are affiliated with extremists and dangerous causes, so I don't think this problem is exclusive to the U.S. military.

But people who have military experience are about 6 percent, 5 percent of the overall population. They comprise 15 percent of the people who were pardoned by Donald Trump just 3 days ago--a share three times greater than that of the general population.

We have watched as a disproportionate share of individuals who have engaged in mass shootings have had a military background. Now, a lot of that is connected to post-traumatic stress disorder and our failure to get services to those individuals. That is on us, and we should have that conversation as well.

But Pete Hegseth has said that this issue of whether the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have influence inside the military--and there are plenty of reports that there are lots of active channels of communication and recruitment between these rightwing groups and the military--he says that problem is fake. It is fake.

Now, I don't know the extent of this problem, but I know it is something we should talk about, and I am very, very worried to have a Secretary of Defense who doesn't believe it is a problem even worth mentioning.

Lastly, I want to talk about what I maybe think is the most dangerous part of Pete Hegseth's views on the military, and that is his history of support for war criminals, his low regard for the Code of Military Justice, and his disbelief--his nonbelief in the concept of international law and the laws of war.

It is pretty shocking that we are even having a debate here about whether the U.S. military should engage in torture or adhere to the Geneva Conventions. For those of us that served with John McCain, I cannot believe what he would think about the decision of a Republican President to appoint a Secretary of Defense who does not believe in the Geneva Conventions and the basic laws of war and claims that it is weak or unmanly to believe that there should be some common set of rules about how we engage in war.

I do think it is legitimate to have a conversation about the rules of engagement. We should always be willing to revisit the rules of engagement. It is entirely possible--plausible even--that the rules that we apply to our soldiers in very difficult, complicated engagements, where they often don't know who is friend or foe, are outdated. We should be willing to have that conversation. But that is not what Pete Hegseth is interested in. He is interested in obliterating the rules of engagement. He doesn't want any constraints on our soldiers.

While it is true that many of the enemies that we fight don't follow any rules at all, it is not good for U.S. security more broadly to give up on international law, the rules of war, and the rules of engagement and just accept a race to the bottom.

At the hearing, Ranking Member Reed asked Pete Hegseth about three instances of clemency granted by President Trump in 2019--grants of clemency that the nominee supports.

One soldier, a lieutenant in the Army, had been serving for 19 years in prison and was pardoned after being convicted of two counts of second-degree murder for ordering a soldier to fire on unarmed Afghan motorcyclists in 2012. Another was pardoned after being charged with murder of an Afghan in 2010. Another pardon was for an individual who posed and took photos with a corpse during a 2017 deployment to Iraq.

This problem is minuscule inside our Armed Forces. It really is. Mr. President, 99.99 percent of our soldiers, men and women who fight for us, are never, ever engaged in these kinds of horrific crimes. The reason for that is, A, because we have good, moral people fighting for us, and B, because we have a code of conduct, and that deterrent helps to make sure that the instances of misconduct are very, very small--are infinitesimal. If all of a sudden that code of conduct is obliterated, then it becomes harder for our military leadership to make sure that when we are in war, we are following those rules of engagement.

Remember, our power in the world is our tanks and our soldiers, our airplanes and our aircraft carriers, but it has always been our moral authority. We have never been perfect. We have never had leadership that was perfect. But to voluntarily give up on our belief that U.S. troops are held to a higher standard than our enemies--that shrinks our power in the world that makes enemies run away from us.

In a world today where there is just a dissent from truth, right-- that is what Putin wants. Putin wants to obliterate objectivism in this world, to believe that there is no right or wrong, that everything is just an individual's viewpoint. When we retreat from those long-held and consensus-developed ideas about, for instance, not torturing our enemies during times of war, it provides a lift and assist to people like Putin who are trying to make us believe that there is no such thing as right or wrong in the world, that it is all just different shades of gray.

So I understand that much of the debate here will be about this litany of really ugly personal misconduct, and I think that is reason alone to say: You know what, find somebody else.

It is not as if Pete Hegseth is the only person qualified to run the Department of Defense. There are other people who are loyal to Donald Trump, who are conservative, maybe even believe in this campaign against wokeism, but don't have the history of personal misconduct.

But I also think that these questions about women in combat, about the political campaigns that will be run inside the Department that will breed a sense of paranoia, about taking seriously small but growing, real threats to us, like extremism in the military, and then this bigger question of making sure we have fealty to the laws of war and prohibitions against torture--I think all of those really concerning views of this nominee, even if the misconduct didn't exist, would be enough for us to say: Find somebody else. Find somebody else who is just going to do the job instead of trying to bring these political agendas, whether it is misogyny or anti-wokeism or anti- multilateralism, into a job that really should be pretty simple. Lead our troops. Protect the Nation. Lift up America's standing in the world.

I know the cake may be baked at this point, but I just want to make one more plea to my Republican colleagues to reconsider their decision to confirm to lead the Department of Defense somebody who seems just hellbent mostly on pursuing a political--not military--agenda that I truly believe is certain to weaken our Armed Forces and threaten our national security.

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