Cowardly Senators and the Specter of Political Violence
One of the smaller dramas of recent weeks was the US Senate's confirmation of Todd Blanche as Attorney General of the United States (AG). I must emphasize that virtually no Trump-era stories are small by historical standards, meaning that "smaller"in the previous sentence should be understood in an even more relative sense than usual. It was a drama that provides some important lessons, however, especially in explaining the continued refusal of Republicans in political office to stand against the Trump regime.
It is unlikely that anyone reading this column needs to be reminded that Blanche was a truly terrible choice to be anywhere near the Department of Justice (DOJ). Even so, a few lowlights will set the appropriate context. The man who failed while defending Trump against felony charges in New York was rewarded with the runner-up job at DOJ, during which time he took the lead in derailing the Epstein investigation. His efforts there included meeting in prison with Epstein's partner in child sex trafficking, then having her moved to a cushy federal detention facility -- but only after she claimed that Trump had done nothing wrong. Even after doing all of that for his patron, Blanche later said that if Trump had not tapped him to replace Pam Bondi as AG, he would have said, "I love you, sir."
During his confirmation hearings, Blanche was put under pressure to meet with some of the survivors of Epstein's heinous crimes. It seems useful here to quote at length from a piece by Rachel Foster at The Contrarian:
For nine months, these women had repeatedly requested a meeting with Blanche and were ignored. Only after Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) made clear that Blanche’s confirmation depended on meeting with the survivors did Blanche scramble to arrange a hasty last-minute meeting. The survivors changed their travel plans and raced back to Capitol Hill after two exhausting days of advocacy meetings and Senate hearings. Their attorneys received so little notice that they barely had time to join by Zoom, much less prepare for what should have been a thoughtful and productive conversation.
Instead, the meeting became another chapter in a three-decade pattern of institutional failure.
Rather than listening, Blanche interrupted survivors, argued over tone and semantics, minimized decades of Justice Department failures and betrayal, and condescendingly dismissed the legitimate anger of women who have spent 30 years trying to be heard by the government institutions charged with protecting them. He offered no credible plan to investigate or prosecute anyone beyond Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. He instead, to the shock of everyone in the room, suggested they start over by filing reports with the FBI – reports that survivors had been filing since 1996. In doing so, he effectively admitted he had not even reviewed the Epstein files before meeting with the very women whose abuse those files document.
I think it is fair to describe that as not good. Moreover, Blanche is terrible on every other issue, including saying that he is on board with Trump's efforts to federalize elections: "Election integrity is something that President Trump ran on, and the American people elected him. [T]he Department of Justice is trying to investigate issues around elections to make sure they’re fair and make sure they’re conducted the right way." Beyond the old "Trump said X during the campaign, and he won, so there are no limits on what we can do" move, what Blanche is defending is an executive order to have states send "voter rolls, including voters’ names, dates of birth, residential addresses, state driver’s licenses and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers" to the federal government.
Trump said at a recent rally that he thinks Blanche has "a shot at being the greatest ever, if he remains tough and strong." Obviously, Blanche knows how to crack the incredibly complicated code behind those words. This past weekend, he made news by refusing to pledge to act independently of the White House, asserting absurdly that "no attorney general should ever pledge that." Why not? "[T]his narrative that’s mostly pushed by the left and pushed by the media that the president’s going to pull me aside and ask me to do something illegal is completely a false narrative, not true, will not happen and hasn’t happened."
"Tough and strong" indeed. And Blanche's promises that he has killed effort to create a "weaponization" slush fund to pay money to January 6 insurrectionists are hardly believable.
Given all of that, why did I begin this column by calling Blanche's confirmation one of the smaller dramas of the last few weeks? Is it because he falls into the category of people who are in the tank for Trump but who would have been replaced by someone just as bad?
I have argued here on Dorf on Law that it is important to be careful not to place excessive emphasis on the particular clown in the clown show who happens to be onstage at any given moment. In a column less than two months into Trump's current term, I argued that only Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presented unique threats that any replacements would be hard-pressed to replicate.
With Musk stepping out of his White House role soon thereafter, RKF Jr remained as the lone unique baddie, but three months ago I followed up with a column adding Pete Hegseth to the hall of shame: "[W]e now know that Hegseth seems to have been the person who made the difference in pushing Trump into the invasion of Iran. ... 'Within the cabinet, Mr. Hegseth was the biggest proponent of a military campaign against Iran,' according to reporting in The Times."
Notably, however, I stipulated in that column that "I consider Blanche to have genuine potential (in the worst sense) here, but what he has done thus far seems to differ only in style from [Bondi]. Blanche does seem to have the desire to be a supervillain, but he is not there yet." I concluded: "So it is time for RFKJr to move over, because there is a new menace to society at the door. And while they are getting Hegseth settled, they should leave space for Blanche or some other current unknown to break into The Show."
In the three months since I wrote that column, it has become clear that Blanche is living down to the lowest of low expectations, such that he surely is now in the big leagues of uniquely harmful Trumpists. And given that he is in charge of one of the most powerful arms of government, how is that in any way a small thing, even in the current hellscape in which we live?
The answer is that this is not equivalent to replacing, say, Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin to run the racist immigration crackdown at DHS, or of replacing someone like Kash Patel as FBI Director if he were ever to be fired. (Does anyone think Trump would have a difficult time finding anyone who could do as much damage as Patel has done, if not more?) No, the simple answer is that Blanche was going to be replaced with Blanche.
Huh? During the very brief period a few weeks ago when some Republican senators were making grunting noises about not confirming Blanche, Trump said that he would respond by keeping Blanche in the AG's office by withdrawing his nomination and keeping him in his then-current status as Acting AG. That is, Blanche had already been wreaking havoc at DOJ for months, but blocking his nomination was not going to make that stop. Even if Blanche's badness would be as difficult to replicate as I am suggesting here that it might be, I can say with confidence that Todd Blanche is certainly every bit as bad as Todd Blanche.
None of which is to say that he should have been confirmed, of course. Senators who had the opportunity to say whether, in their considered judgment, Blanche should be confirmed as the not-merely-Acting Attorney General of the United States should have rejected him. "That burglar might be able to find a way to take your things no matter what you do" is no reason to say, "Well in that case, I'll just let him into my house and let him take anything he wants."
Even so, fifty Senate Republicans voted to confirm Blanche. Mitch McConnell would have been a yea as well (assuming he was and/or is alive), and even if it had been a tie, the VP's vote would have put Blanche in office.
In the block quote above, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina is identified as the man who insisted "that Blanche’s confirmation depended on meeting with the survivors." Blanche grudgingly did the bare minimum by sitting in a room with the women who were trafficked by Epstein when they were girls, then made matters worse by insulting and belittling them. How did Tillis vote? Yea, of course.
What about the other senators who indicated that they might not go along? John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana both fell in line in the end. Again, I will quote at length from a source, in this case a Politico report on the voting:
Cassidy’s decision was swayed by Blanche reaching a deal with Texas Sen. John Cornyn to nullify the payout fund for Trump allies — including Jan. 6 rioters pardoned by Trump — on Aug. 2. The fact that Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general, was “comfortable” with the deal was important to Cassidy, he said.
“What I’m told as regards to the Anti-Weaponization Fund, if you put it in the context of the political environment, the judicial environment, the process you would have to go back through in order to reinstate it, that effectively it’s dead,” Cassidy said to Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
There were “a lot of positive things to say about Todd Blanche” and “stable leadership” was necessary for the DOJ to do its job, Cassidy said.
Cassidy said, however, that he almost voted against Blanche for continuing to grant protection to Trump and his family from IRS probes.
“That is wrong — and no American should be targeted by the law, but no American should be above the law. And that, frankly, almost weighed to vote ‘No.’”
Such profiles in courage! Given that Cornyn has been lauded as an "institutionalist," which apparently is supposed to mean that he cares about the US Senate as an essential and independently powerful part of the constitutional system, one might think that he would have balked at falling in line with whatever Trump wants. Indeed, when Cornyn lost his primary earlier this year to a Trump-backed walking scandal, Cornyn reportedly claimed that this had freed him to be his own man:
Now the Trump administration might find itself having to come to terms with Mr. Cornyn as he flexes new political freedom, joining a handful of other Senate Republicans not seeking re-election or defeated in primaries at Mr. Trump’s behest who now have added room to maneuver.
“I think it is going to be a pretty bumpy ride for the next seven months,” Mr. Cornyn said during a wide-ranging conversation in his Capitol office as he reflected on the tumultuous Texas election and his nearly quarter-century in Washington.
“It does give some of us a little more freedom, and certainly leverage,” he said, before invoking Mr. Trump’s notoriously heated Oval Office meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine last year. “As the president told President Zelensky when he was in his office a year or so ago — he said, ‘You don’t have any cards.’ Well, we’ve got some cards to play.”
One hopes that Cornyn's post-retirement plans do not include taking up poker, because he will soon be living on nothing but the Social Security benefits that he spent his career trying to cut. And who else is included in the "some of us" that Cornyn mentioned? None other than Tillis and Cassidy, who are also retiring.
Notably, one of the two Republicans who voted against Blanche's confirmation was Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said last year that "we are all afraid," referring to other Senate Republicans when it comes to crossing Trump, adding: "I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real." The news coverage at the time tended to assume that she meant political retaliation, but it seemed obvious that the fear she vaguely described had something to do with more than political lifespans.
And now we have three men who are leaving the Senate because of Trump, with no more fear about their political survival, yet those dead men walking could not even stand up and make the easiest call in the world. What makes them still so afraid? What other explanations remain?
- Neil H. Buchanan