Todd Blanche’s Nomination Strains the Senate’s Advice-and-Consent Duty

What benefit of norms is owed to someone who disdains norms? There are many sufficient reasons to oppose confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general. Presidents generally are owed some deference in selecting Cabinet members, but “some” implies limits, lest the Senate’s advice-and-consent duty be drained of responsibility. And not all presidents are equally owed. Today’s president is owed little, given his contempt for the unwritten rules of civility that can lubricate a congenial society’s governance.Eight days after the 2024 election, President Trump set the tone of his second term by announcing his beau ideal of an attorney general: Representative Matt Gaetz. This insult lasted eight days, until Mr. Gaetz withdrew as nominee. He had resigned from the House earlier, reportedly to prevent release of the House Ethics Committee’s report on his alleged drug use and sexual misconduct, which a woman said included sex with her twice when she was 17.Mr. Trump settled for Pam Bondi as attorney general, with Mr. Blanche as her deputy. While Mr. Blanche was the Justice Department’s second-in-command, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, a Justice appendage, sought criminal indictments of six congressional Democrats, all with military or intelligence backgrounds. They had made a video.Made while Mr. Trump’s administration was killing people on boats (in international waters) suspected of carrying drugs, the video said what the Uniform Code of Military Justice says: Do not obey illegal orders. A grand jury did something vanishingly rare in criminal cases. It refused to indict the six.Mr. Blanche was acting attorney general when the Justice Department took seriously Seashellgate. His department secured a second indictment of the former FBI director, James B. Comey, this time for posting a photograph of shells arranged on a beach to read “86 47”; “86” is slang for “remove.” Mr. Trump is the 47th president. Mr. Blanche’s DOJ pretended to regard Mr. Comey’s infantile gesture as a prosecutable threat.Republican senators now have demanded Mr. Blanche’s assurances that the proposed $1.776 billion slush fund, for compensating persons Mr. Trump designates as victims of Biden administration persecution, is dead. But this grift was incubated in Mr. Blanche’s DOJ.Mr. Blanche, who serves at the pleasure of the president, signed a memo pledging that the IRS is “Forever Barred” from “examinations” of Mr. Trump, certain members of his family, the Trump Organization and “related or affiliated individuals.” This “negotiated” — try not to snicker — settlement between the president and the executive branch he heads exemplifies the administration’s sludge of self-dealing.Trump sicced Blanche’s compliant Justice Department on the former Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, ostensibly about fictitious criminality in construction spending, actually to pressure Mr. Powell to resign. With Mr. Blanche as deputy, then acting, attorney general, the Justice Department (per the Economist) gave courts inaccurate information “nearly 100 times in Mr Trump’s first 14 months.”In April, Mr. Blanche became acting attorney general when Trump fired Ms. Bondi. “Nobody has any idea why,” said Mr. Blanche. Plausible reports said Mr. Trump considered Ms. Bondi insufficiently aggressive about prosecuting his enemies. Mr. Blanche has said, cloudily, that “some” Justice Department prosecutions “involve men, women, and entities” that Mr. Trump “has had issues with. … That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning, to lead this country.”Mr. Blanche said it is “completely false” that the president targets political enemies. Mr. Trump merely “wants justice.” Mr. Blanche said he was not “celebrating” Mr. Trump’s pardons of almost all the approximately 1,500 January 6 rioters when, to a gathering of Trump supporters, he praised the “generous” pardons as one of the administration’s accomplishments.If at most four Republican senators had, in committee or floor votes, behaved as independently as the Founders thought senators would, Ms. Bondi, Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others would not have been confirmed to offices far above their competences. Children probably have died of measles, and of hepatitis B passed from mothers to infants, because of vaccine hesitancy promoted by Mr. Kennedy, who lied when he promised not to indulge in such quackery if confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services.Now comes Mr. Blanche. He received this embarrassingly backhanded endorsement (in the Wall Street Journal) from former attorney general William Barr: Mr. Blanche “will run the department as effectively as anyone could under President Trump.” Is this sufficient reassurance for Republican senators? Or will, at last, a nominee trigger their gag reflexes?Once, when someone noted that Senator Richard Russell, the Georgia Democrat, had “served under” six presidents, Russell bristled, saying he “served with” six. It will be a pleasant surprise if, concerning Mr. Blanche, a few Republican senators become similarly sensitive about those prepositions.The Washington Post

Todd Blanche’s Nomination Strains the Senate’s Advice-and-Consent Duty

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