I think Todd Blanche is a solid pick for attorney general. Blanche has handled a hard situation about as well as can be hoped. In my experience, ideologically, he’s a zealous convert. No, it’s probably not because he read Up From Liberalism or Witness but rather because of how the left has treated Trump and his allies; still, negative polarization is real.
While I like Blanche, I get that others don’t. That’s not really the question, though, at least not for a Republican senator. They aren’t commentators — although they often forget it; they’re legislators. Their core job is to cast votes that govern the country. In other words, they’re in the statecraft business and not the opinion business.
This means that it’s not about Blanche but about the Department of Justice in the Trump administration. The context matters. The question is no more whether Todd Blanche would make a good attorney general for Ronald Reagan than it is whether Dick Thornburgh would make a good attorney general for Donald Trump. That’s fantasy baseball. The real world context of the current nomination is whether Blanche is a suitable attorney general for Trump.
When I was in the Leader’s office, former attorney general Mike Mukasey once observed to me that the most important question to ask is always “compared to what?” That’s the key to evaluating the Blanche nomination. That’s the question a skeptical senator needs to ask.
The simple fact is that a Bill Barr or a Mike Mukasey isn’t waiting on the sidelines to come back. That kind of attorney general has no interest in the job at this point and — just as importantly — the president has no interest in nominating such a person. You may wish that he did and that such a person were willing to serve, but that’s not the world we live in and there’s no wishing it into existence. Or to put it in senatorial terms, you have to hit the ball where it lies; you don’t get to wish it on to the green.
So where does the ball lie? The Justice Department is deep in the rough. This was to be expected in a Trump administration. The guy simply doesn’t like the usual way DOJ works. He doesn’t like being told no by his lawyers. He has no time for the formalism (and often hypocrisy) of “DOJ independence.” He thinks — with quite a bit of justification — that the Department spent eight years in the business of ruining his life. His relationship with the DOJ was always going to be fraught.
The problem was compounded by DOGE and related personnel actions early in his second term. The New York Times bemoans how many lawyers have left the administration. Those poor nonpartisan civil servants! Nuts. Fewer lawyers at the Department of Education stringing up frat boys in Title IX kangaroo courts is an unalloyed good. A Civil Rights Division without the bodies to serve its roving commission against police departments that actually fight crime is to be desired. But DOJ does more than enforce Deep State priorities. Incentives were set in 2025 that pushed out the kind of experienced and competent senior lawyers who actually follow orders and keep lower-level careers in line. The anti-bureaucratic chemo killed off a lot of functioning organs. I wish it hadn’t, but it did. That’s just the reality of it.
As a result the politicals in charge of the Department have had their work cut out for them from the word go. The vast majority of them are or were very capable — Blanche, Emil Bove, Trent McCotter, Colin McDonald, Stanley Woodward, Abishek Kambli, Adam Gustafson, Harmeet Dhillon, Brett Shumate, John Sauer, Sarah Harris, Hashim Mooppan, Elliot Gaiser, Omeed Assefi … the list could go on. A Republican senator may disagree with the president’s priorities at times, but these people all know or knew their business in executing on them. These are generally the kind of people who would serve in any Republican administration.
But this isn’t any Republican administration; it’s Donald Trump’s. Between his uniquely sour view of DOJ and their staffing issues, they have had an unusually challenging assignment. Throw in the unprecedented judicial resistance to any and all actions by the president, and it’s a very hard job.
There’s a sort of post-Watergate view that their job is to push back on the president. They need to preserve the independence of the Department by saying “no” to the president. There are a few problems with this.
First, the Department is not “independent.” It is part of the executive branch, and like all of the executive branch it reports to the president. This was the core of Justice Scalia’s monumental dissent in Morrison v. Olson. There are political customs surrounding DOJ, in particular when it comes to prosecutions, that are designed to insulate it from political pressure from above — because, as a general matter, political prosecutions are bad for a republic.
Trump has never bought in to these customs. It was one of his early friction points with Barr: He’d tweet about cases Barr was actually investigating, therefore making it harder for Barr to do his job without the appearance of interference. But from Trump’s perspective this is just formalistic hypocrisy. In Democratic administrations, in particular, the White House doesn’t need to direct political prosecutions because the political and career staff at the Department know full well whom to prosecute. Joe Biden didn’t need to tell Merrick Garland to prosecute Donald Trump. He didn’t need to tell him to cook up a sweetheart deal in Delaware for Hunter. He didn’t need to tell Kristen Clarke to jail all the abortion protestors. He didn’t need to tell Garland to allow retaliatory harassment of Supreme Court justices after the Dobbs leak. DOJ leadership knew what it needed to do without being told.
Trump wants a DOJ that responds to his priorities the way that Garland responded to Biden’s or that “wing-man” Eric Holder responded to Barack Obama’s. Blanche understands those priorities and acts on them. I very much doubt Trump is telling him to do the things Senate Republicans don’t like and Trump does; Blanche is just doing what he perceives the priorities of the president to be. Insofar as Republican senators care about the formalism of “DOJ independence,” that’s paradoxically a good thing. Blanche avoids the spectacle of the president controlling the Department from Truth Social by anticipating administration priorities — even if they don’t like them.
There are solutions if they don’t like those priorities. The Senate has levers to pull, as Thom Tillis demonstrated with the Jerome Powell investigation. But if Congress doesn’t like what the executive branch is doing policy-wise, the solution is not to install saboteurs underneath the president who report to the Senate. The solution is for ambition to counteract ambition. There’s nothing wrong with traditional legislative hostage taking. The problem here is that the Blanche decision isn’t properly about hostage taking but about governance.
Even if the Senate wanted a saboteur, it won’t get one. Anyone Trump puts in this position will effectuate his priorities. It’s as certain as the rising of the sun. Which means Republican Senators need to ask the governance question: Do they want a competent lawyer with actual DOJ experience doing that, or do they want Matt Gaetz? Do they want someone who keeps the Department at least somewhat formally separate from the president, anticipating the his desires in order to keep him out of day-to-day management, or do they want someone taking public instruction from Truth Social?
Another significant governance problem DOJ has is the seeming non-application of the so-called “contacts policy.” Normally communications between the White House and DOJ are channeled carefully to preserve the illusion of independence. Insofar as this is another post-Watergate hypocrisy, good riddance. Unfortunately, it’s more than that. Who knows how many people inside the RFK Building have the president’s phone number. Under Pam Bondi, I have heard, this caused no end of mischief. If a subordinate didn’t like a decision from leadership, he would just call the president and complain. That’s simply no way to run a railroad. It’s bad not because it’s Nixonian; it’s bad because it leads to backbiting and incompetent execution. Given Blanche’s relationship with the president and his formidable legal background, I think he’s best positioned to curtail this practice and actually run DOJ like an attorney general is supposed to. I have little such confidence in potential alternative selections.
Any alternative is not going to have that set of skills that currently distinguish Blanche: Real legal chops, significant experience in the Department, the personal trust of the president, and a commitment to his policies. Again, the alternative is not going to be the second-coming (third coming?) of Bill Barr. It will be the first coming of Alina Habba.
If you’re a Republican senator, is that what you want? Maybe. “Give him enough rope to hang himself.” But it’s not that; it’s hanging DOJ. Trump will be fine one way or the other. The context isn’t Trump but rather DOJ. If you’re a Republican senator, do you want DOJ competently run under Donald Trump understanding that 95 percent of what DOJ does is the standard enforcement of legal and policy priorities you agree with?
If your focus is on the 95 percent (as it should be), you should want competent leadership and Blanche is the best on offer for that. If you want to scuttle the 95 percent due to outrage over the 5 percent, the 5 percent will still happen at the expense of the 95 percent. That is a poor choice from a statesmanship perspective.
The other context is that Blanche probably isn’t going anywhere. The odds are high that he can keep doing his current job indefinitely.
There are two ways to look at this. The correct one, in my view, is to ask what the upside is in opposing him if you can’t, in fact, stop him? Making a point? The basic choice for all senators is, as Mitch McConnell says, “Do you want to make a law or make a point?” To borrow from McConnell again, I’ve seen them both, and making laws is better. The media are always urging Republicans to partake in the Animal House theory of legislation: What the Senate needs is a futile and stupid gesture. I don’t think it’s the right path for responsible senators.
The other way is to ask, well, what’s the downside in opposing him if he’s going to stay anyway? Again thinking back to the 95 percent of what DOJ does that’s good, those legitimate priorities will be best served in the back nine of the Trump administration with as many Senate-confirmed officers in place as possible. To make the matter concrete, with the DAG as an acting attorney general, there will also be a perpetual acting DAG. Imagine how the post-election crises of 2020 would have gone with that structure in place; it would have been absolute chaos. By 2028 it may be actings all the way down, regardless, but the more confirmed officers there are going into 2027, the less likely that will be.
In other words, because Blanche can do the job indefinitely, the upside of not confirming him is performative while the downside is real.
So from the perspective of a Trump-skeptical senator, there are a few options.
- You can oppose Blanche to send a message while he stays in his current position. That is, you can expend capital for no real benefit.
- You can oppose Blanche with an eye toward getting an alternative. You really won’t like, however, what’s behind door number two.
- You can support Blanche, recognizing that, because Trump is the president and all that entails, Blanche is actually the best man available in terms of running DOJ competently.
I’d go with option three.