Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday overcame a boycott by their Democrat counterparts to approve the nomination of Steven Mnuchin to serve as U.S. Treasury secretary.
Committee Democrats, who boycotted a scheduled vote Tuesday in order to avoid having a quorum, did not vote.
Wednesday’s 14-0 partisan vote came after the committee agreed to suspend a rule that requires a quorum for nomination votes. “We took some unprecedented actions today due to the unprecedented obstruction on the part of our colleagues,” committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said in a statement after the vote. A full Senate vote on the nomination has not been scheduled.
Committee member Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said in a statement he did not vote for Mr. Mnuchin because “I believe that managing the world’s largest economy is too important a responsibility to hand over to someone who is so lacking in both the depth of policy knowledge and economic decision-making experience that we should expect for our highest-ranking official at the Treasury Department.”
