The Senate Armed Services Committee today voted to move Chuck Hagel’s nomination to become Secretary of Defense to the full Senate on Tuesday afternoon with a vote of 14 to 11, with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) yet to vote, split down party lines.

“Senator Hagel has received broad support from an array of senior statesmen and foreign policy dignitaries,” Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) said before the vote. Levin continued to list the impressive array of endorsements that Hagel has received, noting the long-list of positions Hagel holds that stand firmly in the mainstream.

A vote on the floor of the Senate could come as soon as tomorrow, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Reid today announced that he would not honor holds — informal filibuster threats placed by individual Senators — from the GOP, forcing them to actually filibuster the nomination to prevent it from coming to a vote.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) has already pledged to lead the charge in a filibuster, the first against a Defense Secretary nominee, once the nomination hits the Senate floor. Inhofe, during the discussion before the vote, cited how pleased he was that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) displayed his misleading evidence during Hagel’s testimony. Cruz and Inhofe also implied during the hearing that Hagel has taken money from Saudi and possibly other foreign governments, an argument without proof that found itself harshly challenged.

Inhofe’s plan is unlikely to succeed, though. Several GOP members have already pledged to either vote for Hagel — such as Sen. Thad Chochran (R-MS) — or oppose a filibuster — like Hagel opponent Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — making the odds of Republicans mustering the 41 votes necessary to prevent cloture on the debate unlikely. While a movement is growing to have a sixty vote threshold for Hagel that is somehow not a filibuster, Hagel has more than enough votes on his side to easily clear the majority required for final confirmation.

Neocons and their allies have been attacking Hagel since weeks before its official announcement. In their desperation in recent weeks, Republicans are throwing everything they can at the nominee, in hopes of derailing him. Instead, their efforts are proving ineffective at best, damaging to their own party at worst.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) criticized Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) during an Senate Armed Services Committee meeting today on Chuck Hagel’s Defense Secretary nomination for suggesting that Hagel is being influenced financially by foreign countries.

During the meeting, Cruz objected to moving forward with Hagel’s nomination, saying — without offering any evidence — that the former Republican senator may have received money directly from countries like North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

“This Senator feels like that Senator Cruz has gone over the line,” Nelson shot back at Cruz. “He basically has impugned the patriotism of the nominee.” The Florida Democrat continued:

NELSON: In your conclusions which you are entitled to come to about him in essence about him being cozy with Iran. And you have also stated your opinion that you don’t think he has been truthful with this committee. Now those are two fairly strong statements. And I couldn’t help but having had the privilage of serving on this committee for a while, and seeing the two former chairman on either side of the nominee and I looked at the former Repubican chairman John Warner’s face as some of the questions were asked as he visibly winced. There’s a certain degree of comity and civility that this committee has always been known for. And clearly in the sharpness difference of opinion to question in essence whether somebody is a fellow traveler with another country I think is taking it too far.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) piled on: “I just want to make it clear. Senator Hagel is an honorable man. He has served his country and no one on this committee at any time should impugn his character or his integrity,” he said. Watch the clip:

A freshman lawmaker in Tennessee is pushing to revoke the official status of any United Nations representative who sets foot within his state — and criminalize the actions of international elections monitors.

The proposal comes on the heels of last year’s right-wing outrage that the “United Nations” was sending officials to monitor the U.S. national elections. Unimportant to critics of the program was the fact that the program was neither run by the U.N. — instead being conducted by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe — nor that it’s been going on for more than a decade.

That hasn’t stopped newly elected state Rep. James “Micah” Van Huss (R) from introducing legislation that would keep such an atrocity from ever happening on Tennessean soil again. Van Huss has put forward two bills to stop the U.N. in its tracks. H.B. 588 adds a section into Tennessee law that reads: “Any representative of the United Nations who enters the state loses all official status and shall not operate in the state in any official capacity.” H.B. 589, meanwhile, puts forward that “Representatives of the United Nations shall not observe elections in the state” and that “violation of this section is a Class C misdemeanor.”

Van Huss, who came up with the push at a Tea Party event during his campaign, defended his proposal as being necessary to guarantee freedom:

“I feel, as a lot of my constituents do, that the United Nations continues to put forth agendas that would infringe on our personal liberties; that’s not the freedom that I fought for, and not the freedom that my buddies gave their lives for,” Van Huss, R-Jonesborough, told the Kingsport Times-News in an email.

The bill is being sponsored on the Senate side by state Sen. Frank Niceley (R). Disturbingly enough, Tennessee’s legislature may well pass Van Huss’ bill. Last year, the body sent to Gov. Bill Haslam (R) a non-binding resolution that slammed the U.N’s Agenda 21 for its “destructive and insidious nature.” Haslam rightly refused to sign the bill, as he believes that environmental protection and economic growth are not mutually exclusive. Requests for comment from the office of House Speaker Beth Harwell on Van Huss’ bills were not immediately returned.

Tennessee is just one of a multitude of states in which Republican lawmakers are attempting to place limits to the United Nations’ supposed overreaching power. During the lead-up to the election, Republicans from Texas and Iowa each threatened to arrest any OSCE observers who monitored elections.

Legislatures from Georgia to Oklahoma to Indiana have moved bills seeking to counter the U.N. and Agenda 21, whose threat to America’s golf courses Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has made well-known. The National Republican Party is also in on the action, having made sure to insert language into their 2012 Platform that called the non-binding series of resolutions “erosive to American sovereignty.”

News that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — also known as North Korea — has tested its third nuclear weapon has given Republicans a new angle to trot out old attacks on the Obama administration’s security priorities.

The attacks come from a multitude of directions, but all share the common thread of being firmly opposed to some part of the Obama administration agenda:

“North Korea just responded to POTUS principle of ‘national security by kumbaya.’”

The Weekly Standard and former Rep. Allen West (R-FL) chose to focus on the U.S. response to the test, highlighting their disdain for international cooperation and what they unfairly deem Obama’s weakness in the face of international challenges:

North Korea just responded to POTUS principle of “national security by kumbaya.”

— Allen West (@AllenWest) February 12, 2013

Such right-wing attacks on Obama fail to include what they propose as a proper policy towards North Korea. Scoffing at the U.N. Security Council is easy, as proved by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), but cooperation from China — a key member of the Council — will be necessary for any solution on the Korean peninsula. The North Korean government has likewise proved unresponsive to the combination of carrots and sticks by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations alike.

“U.S. security cannot…afford even more cuts to U.S. defense capabilities”

Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Buck McKeon used the North Korean test as an opportunity to reissue his fears about the pending cuts to the military budget, saying in a statement, “U.S. security cannot, in the face of the president’s sequester and $500 billion in reductions to the DoD budget so far, afford even more cuts to U.S. defense capabilities, such as our nuclear deterrent.”

Nuclear deterrent is based around the idea that other countries know that any attack on the United States would be met with a nuclear counter-strike. Sequestration’s cuts to the military budget — while clearly better if targeted rather across the board — would still leave the U.S. with the largest military budget in the world, as well as the largest nuclear stockpile.

“Will POTUS propose US nuclear weapon cuts the day after North Korea conducts another nuke test?”

President Obama is expected to use tonight’s State of the Union address to restart discussion of reducing the U.S. nuclear stockpile in his second term. With that in mind, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the Senate Majority Whip and a long-time opponent of nuclear disarmament, took to Twitter:

Will POTUS propose US nuclear weapon cuts the day after North Korea conducts another nuke test? fb.me/XYXZTDOX

— JohnCornyn (@JohnCornyn) February 12, 2013

The United States in 2010 possessed approximately 5,113 nuclear warheads, with only Russia close to matching that number. In contrast, North Korea currently possesses enough plutonium for between two to four more bombs at the most and is under sanction preventing import of new nuclear material. While today’s test shows some improvement over previous tests’ yields, it is unlikely that Korean nuclear technology has been miniaturized enough to fit atop a ballistic missile. Any cuts to the nuclear weapons in the U.S. would do little to upset so large an imbalance.