The Devil and Todd Blanche

Our acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, is barely out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. A vote on his confirmation hasn’t even been set by the Senate. Yet already we’re thinking about the Saturday Night Massacre. That took place on the night of October 20, 1973, when Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire a runaway special counsel, Archibald Cox of Harvard. Richardson couldn’t do it, the Constitution be damned.What was the problem? The attorney general, after all, serves at the pleasure of the president. It turns out, though, that Mr. Richardson had wanted the job of attorney general so badly that during his quest for confirmation, he went to Capitol Hill and made a promise to the solons. The promise was that if the Senate confirmed him, he would not fire the special counsel, except for cause, even if the president ordered him to do it.The president did order Richardson to fire Cox, and Richardson was in a trap. The man in line to be our top law enforcement officer had made an agreement with the Senate to block the president from the faithful execution of the law. So Richardson had to resign. So did his deputy, William Ruckelshaus. The job of executing Nixon’s order to fire the special counsel then fell to the next highest figure in the Justice Department, the solicitor general, Robert Bork.May his memory be for a blessing. Bork was able to do the job because he had cut no deal with the Senate to undermine the president. That is the question that now hangs over Mr. Blanche. The New York Sun carries no brief for Mr. Blanche. One needn’t endorse President Trump’s so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund, though, to spot the constitutional red flags over conditions being put on Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general.The acting attorney general, after all, has made a promise in respect of not setting up an Anti-Weaponization Fund, never mind what Archibald Cox … pardon, an Attorney General Blanche … might be ordered by the president to do. The demands were made by Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, both of whom are in the waning chapters of their service in the upper chamber. Mr. Blanche could still encounter challenges when he comes to a floor vote.Today’s vote in the Judiciary Committee on Mr. Blanche’s nomination, after all, came along party lines. The committee, the Guardian pointed out, voted to advance Mr. Blanche to the full Senate only after he confirmed in writing, via what Mr. Cornyn called an “agency-interpretive guidance document,” that the Anti-Weaponization Fund was dead. Yet the Guardian newspaper nonetheless reckons that Mr. Trump “could easily reverse the deal.” It’s not our intention here to endorse Mr. Trump’s fund. It has faced criticism, among other reasons, for the prospect of compensating January 6 rioters. It is our intention to mark the precedent that would be set for future presidents, and attorneys general, if the upper chamber got to like the idea of imposing terms on its decision to confirm or deny presidential nominations. The devil, after all, tends to get his due.

The Devil and Todd Blanche

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