Democrats attempting to delay the confirmation of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees are doing so because they’re “frustrated that they lost the election” and need to “grow up” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.
Seven of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees will be confirmed on Jan. 20, the same day he is inaugurated, McConnell said during an interview on CBS News’ Face the Nation.
“All of these little procedural complaints are related to their frustration at having not only lost the White House but having lost the Senate,” he said, according to CBS. “I understand that but we need to sort of grow up here and get past that.”
On Friday, the the Office of Government Ethics expressed concern about the confirmation timeline in a letter to Democratic senators, saying that several of Trump’s cabinet pics—like ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson—have not been “fully vetted,” CBS reports. Democrats have recently called for more disclosure from the nominees, including tax returns, according to the network.
Democratic opposition to Trump’s nominees is no different than when Senate Republicans opposed President Obama’s cabinet picks eight years ago, McConnell told CBS, who also dismissed Democrats’ arguments that there are “ethical concerns” with a few of Trump’s picks.
“I was in [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer’s situation eight years ago … what did we do? We confirmed seven cabinet appointments the day President Obama was sworn in,” he told CBS. “We didn’t like most of them either, but he won the election.”
He continued: “We found most of his [Obama’s] Cabinet appointments just as disturbing as they would find President-elect Trump’s,” he said. “And that’s what happens when you lose the election.”
Speaking on the declassified report that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released Friday, McConnell also told CBS that he believes Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. However, he thinks that it “made no difference.”
“There’s no evidence whatsoever that it changed the outcome of the election,” he told CBS, before adding that he doesn’t think it’s “all that unusual for a new president to want to get along with the Russians.”