Hawley blocks two GOP nominees from Senate confirmation over McConnell ties

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) this week added to his list of disputes with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) after blocking efforts to advance the nominations of two of the GOP leader’s former aides.

Hawley is withholding consent for the Senate to fast-track Andrew Ferguson’s nomination to lead the Federal Trade Commission and Todd Inman’s nomination for a senior role with the National Transportation Safety Board. Ferguson was McConnell’s chief legal counsel who was put forward for the FTC role by his former boss, while Inman was a McConnell campaign aide.

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The Missouri senator has long butted heads with McConnell, whom he openly voted against as conference leader. He acknowledged his differences with McConnell in a statement on Tuesday, ahead of a letter he sent the leader directly on Wednesday.

Hawley said Tuesday that he has “significant concerns” about McConnell’s positions on transportation and safety policy and on antitrust and Big Tech. His statement added that he was seeking “to understand” how Ferguson’s and Inman’s views differ from McConnell’s.

In his letter, Hawley noted that the bipartisan nominations legislation being negotiated in the Senate is likely to include only a few GOP appointments.

“If Republicans are planning to install dozens of Biden nominees for positions across the federal government — without a vote — in exchange for just a handful of our own selections, I want to be sure that we get our nominees right,” he wrote.

The letter also included a list of questions the senator had for Ferguson and Inman.

Representatives for McConnell did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment on Hawley’s holds and his Wednesday letter. The top Senate Republican did not address the matter in his Wednesday floor speech.

One group that did respond to the news was the Republican Attorneys General Association, which released a statement calling for the Senate Republican Conference to coalesce behind Ferguson’s nomination.

“Andrew Ferguson and Melissa Holyoak have been indispensable leaders in the fight against Big Tech and have aggressively defended religious liberty,” the group wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “We believe they will be effective FTC Commissioners and urge @SenateGOP to come together and confirm them swiftly.”

Prior to joining the Senate, Hawley was the Republican attorney general for Missouri.

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Hawley, whose 2018 campaign was heavily financed by the McConnell-linked Senate Leadership Fund, has been a foe of the Republican leader since he arrived in Congress.

The first-term senator’s most recent spat with McConnell came after he and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) blocked Hawley’s efforts to include his amendment reauthorizing a compensation program for nuclear contamination victims in the National Defense Authorization Act.