Senate Confirms New Homeland Security Chief

The Senate on Monday evening confirmed Jeh C. Johnson as President Obama’s secretary of homeland security.

Mr. Johnson’s nomination was held up in the Senate fight over filibusters. In the end, however, his appointment was approved, 78 to 16, after the relaxed filibuster rules forced by the Democrats allowed a final vote.

It will not be the first time that Mr. Johnson has a significant influence on the Obama administration’s national security policies. He framed many of them as the Defense Department’s general counsel during Mr. Obama’s first term.

“Jeh has been a critical member of my national security team,” Mr. Obama said in a statement on Monday night. “As secretary of homeland security, Jeh will play a leading role in our efforts to protect the homeland against terrorist attacks, adapt to changing threats, stay prepared for natural disasters, strengthen our border security, and make our immigration system fairer.”

Mr. Johnson, 56, will fill the vacancy left by Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona. She resigned in July to lead the University of California system.

He does not come to the job with Ms. Napolitano’s credentials on border security and immigration. But Mr. Johnson â€" whose first name is pronounced Jay â€" was a legal adviser to Mr. Obama during his first presidential campaign and shares many of the president’s ideas about counterterrorism operations.

In the first term, Mr. Johnson helped Mr. Obama reshape President George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policies. Mr. Johnson influenced the administration’s approach to the detention of terrorism suspects and drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia. And he was a leading force in the drive to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law and to allow gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military.

He has also said that the United States must not be too quick to declare that the fight with Al Qaeda is over. In speeches over the last several years, he has stressed that Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and in North and West Africa continue to pose threats to the United States’ security.

Yet, he has criticized the Obama administration for being too secretive, especially when it comes to drone strikes. “The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy,” Mr. Johnson said in a speech at Fordham University this year. “In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by imagining the worst.”