2 Senate committees advanced 2 of President Trump’s nominees, Pete Hegseth and John Ratcliffe, setting them up for future full votes. Meanwhile, Senator Marco Rubio became the first of the President’s nominees to be confirmed following unanimous votes in the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate proper.

From The Epoch Times. The Senate unanimously approved the nomination of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as secretary of state on Jan. 20, making him the first of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks to receive the green light on Inauguration Day.

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The 99–0 vote took place just an hour after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Rubio had served since 2011, voted unanimously in favor of Rubio, with a 22–0 vote. The Florida senator testified days prior in front of the committee in a five-hour hearing on his foreign policy views. …

Rubio, 53, has likely faced the easiest confirmation process out of Trump’s Cabinet choices. Many senators have worked with Rubio on policy issues, a relationship in which he built bipartisan support. …

Rubio told the committee that he intends to make the State Department “relevant again.” The department over successive administrations has become marginalized because “it takes so long for the State Department to take action,” he said. …

Top on his focus is confronting the Chinese Communist Party, which he defined as “the most potent and dangerous, near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.”

China dominates critical mineral supplies essential in industries such as electronics, energy, and defense. In Washington, there is bipartisan concern over the regime’s military aggression toward its neighbors, covert influence operations, and human rights suppression that has sometimes reached into the United States. …

The Senate Armed Services Committee approved Pete Hegseth as the secretary of defense with a tight 14–13 margin. A full vote on his nomination is expected later this week.

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted 14–3 to approve the nomination of John Ratcliffe as CIA director. …

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(Excerpt from The Epoch Times. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Marco Rubio, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92158283)