Earlier this month, Merrick Garland marked the first anniversary of taking over the United States Department of Justice. It would be an understatement to say that Garland has politicized the DOJ. Garland has turned the Justice Department into something indistinguishable from a left-wing blog.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Unlike some other recent attorneys general — say, Jeff Sessions, another AG who had previously had a judicial nomination rejected by the Senate — Garland did not have a background in elected office and had never been a public presence in culture-war fights. When he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2016, after years on the D.C. Circuit, Garland was known to be a social liberal (Democratic spin about him as a “moderate” to the contrary), but he was widely regarded as a sober-minded, pro-big-government, institutional liberal in the mold of Stephen Breyer rather than a rhetorical bomb-thrower.
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