A Senate committee voted on Thursday to advance President Trump’s nominee as labor secretary to a full Senate vote, with some crossing of party lines — a reflection of intraparty divisions over organized labor.
The nominee, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a former Republican congresswoman from Oregon, faced pointed questions at her confirmation hearing last week over her history of support for labor unions and collective bargaining rights.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s vote was 14 to 9. In the end, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was the sole Republican to oppose the nomination. Three Democrats — Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and John Hickenlooper of Colorado — voted in the nominee’s favor.
Ms. Chavez-DeRemer came with the strong endorsement of the Teamsters union, whose president, Sean O’Brien, spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer. Teamsters packed her confirmation hearing, at which Ms. Chavez-DeRemer was pressed by senators about her past support for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, known as the PRO Act, a sweeping labor bill that sought to strengthen collective bargaining rights. She was a co-sponsor of the measure.
At her hearing, she carefully sought to distance herself from the bill, and also pledged support for Mr. Trump’s agenda — a strategy meant to assuage anxious Republicans on the committee.
Still, Mr. Paul held to an earlier pledge not to support her, citing his opposition to the PRO Act.
While Ms. Chavez-DeRemer won some votes from Democrats, she did not earn the support of the committee’s ranking minority member, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who had voiced cautious optimism about her nomination.
In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Sanders made it clear he was voting not only against her, but against the Trump administration. “The next secretary of labor, the next secretary of education, the next secretary of housing, the next secretary of the Treasury is Elon Musk,” he said. “Let us understand that reality and not play along with this charade.”
