Marshall Billingslea’s bid to become the Trump Administration’s top nuclear arms negotiator may not have been knocked off easy street yet, but it certainly encountered some potholes in his confirmation hearing Tuesday, where the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s top Democrat said the nominee is stained by his support of torture and is generally unfit for the job.
“We should not be moving forward with Mr. Billingslea’s nomination, period,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said in his opening statement to the hearing. “The stain of torture, combined with his credibility gap, should be disqualifying.”
President Donald Trump in May nominated Billingslea as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. He would succeed Andrea Thompson, who stepped down last October.
The showing on Capitol Hill follows Billingslea’s public reintroduction to Washington’s fourth-estate defense wonks at a friendly forum in May. There, the practiced Republican policy hand — a hard-liner on Middle Eastern terrorism and a veteran of the Geroge W. Bush administration’s Defense Department — argued that any change to the ongoing U.S. nuclear arsenal modernization program hurts his chances of negotiating a new arms control agreement with Russia and China.
Billingslea currently serves as special presidential envoy for arms control.
The Trump administration is pressing for a trilateral arms control treaty with Russia and China to replace the New START deal with Moscow, but none of those parties are negotiating such a treaty, yet. China has said it will not. New START will expire in February, if the U.S. president and Russian President Vladimir Putin do not agree to an extension.
During the Bush administration, when he was principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Billingslea was “a strong advocate for hooding, 24-hour interrogations, forced grooming, sleep deprivation, removal of clothing, face- and stomach-slaps, and use of dogs in interrogations,” Menendez said.
Billingslea, revisiting the turn-of-the-millennium debate about whether such so-called advanced interrogation techniques are merely torture by another name, told Menendez that he never supported anything “characterized” to him at the time as torture. Menedez called that answer “disingenuous at best.”
Despite Menendez’s objections, majority Republicans on the committee have the power to advance him to the Senate floor without help from Democrats.
The last times the White House nominated Billingslea for a State Department job, in 2018 and 2019, his nomination didn’t get a floor vote. Both times, Billingslea was up for the role of undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights.
The last time the Senate confirmed Billingslea was in June 2017, when he got through fairly comfortably on a 65-35 margin to become the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing. At the time, 12 Democrats crossed the aisle to join every Senate Republican in voting “aye.”
The Foreign Relations Committee had not scheduled a business meeting to vote on Billingslea’s nomination, at deadline Tuesday.
