President Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, will now move on to a final Senate floor vote for confirmation after senators voted to invoke cloture and limit the remaining floor debate.
Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who also spent 18 years as a prosecutor in Hillsborough County, earned praise this month for her composure during her confirmation hearing, which stretched for nearly six hours. She was also praised for her ability to deftly navigate thorny and politically tricky topics and lines of questioning from some would-be detractors.
By a vote of 52-46, the Senate invoked cloture on the nomination on Monday night, defeating the legislative filibuster.
If confirmed, Bondi stressed, her primary goal would be to enforce federal law without political considerations.
‘Politics has to be taken out of this system,’ Bondi told the Senate Judiciary Committee, a refrain she returned to multiple times during her conversations with lawmakers.
‘This department has been weaponized for years and years and years, and it has to stop,’ she said.
Bondi’s experience and composure in her meetings with lawmakers, as well as during the confirmation hearing itself, won wide praise from Republicans on the panel, as well as some Democrats, who voted last week to approve her nomination.
The vote clears Bondi’s nomination to the Senate floor for a full chamber vote.
Bondi’s experience also earned the backing of former senior officials at the Justice Department, who urged lawmakers in a letter this month to swiftly move to confirm her.
In letters previewed exclusively to Fox News Digital, the more than 110 senior Justice Department officials, including former U.S. attorneys general John Ashcroft, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr and Edwin Meese, expressed their ‘strong and enthusiastic support’ for Bondi, praising both her commitment to the rule of law and her track record as Florida’s former attorney general that they said make her uniquely qualified for the role.
‘It is all too rare for senior Justice Department officials—much less Attorneys General—to have such a wealth of experience in the day-to-day work of keeping our communities safe,’ they wrote.
She was also backed by dozens of former Republican and Democratic state attorneys general, who sent a letter urging her confirmation earlier this month.
‘Many of us have worked directly with Attorney General Bondi and have firsthand knowledge of her fitness for the office,’ the former attorneys general said in the letter, also exclusively previewed to Fox News Digital. ‘We believe that her wealth of prosecutorial experience and commitment to public service make General Bondi a highly qualified nominee for Attorney General of the United States.’