Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee Todd Blanche on Thursday secured the votes he needed to be confirmed by the Senate.
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana turned out to be the decisive vote, and he announced his decision to support Blanche as head of the Department of Justice in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday morning.
“Mr. Blanche is not perfect, and he will tell you this, but the choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche,” Cassidy said. “It is between Mr. Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the department effectively under President Trump, and who indeed may not be as good as Mr. Blanche.”
Blanche’s confirmation hinged on Cassidy’s vote after Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both announced that they would vote against him, citing concerns about the weaponization of the Justice Department and the previous creation of an anti-weaponization fund that lawmakers feared would by used to pay January 6 rioters. Blanche has said that fund is defunct.
Cassidy’s support ends a confirmation saga in which Senate Republicans attempted to extract concessions from the Trump administration related to tamping down what they saw as corruption and weaponization in the DOJ.
While Blanche’s nomination was stuck in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina demanded that the administration kill the anti-weaponization fund once and for all and limit the scope of a settlement agreement that would have shielded Trump and his family members from audits by the IRS.
Ultimately, they struck a deal with the administration and got some concessions, but it is unclear just how much the administration addressed their concerns. The settlement agreement itself remains unchanged — they merely received written confirmation from Blanche that he interprets the audit immunity to be narrower than originally thought. As for the anti-weaponization fund, there is nothing to stop the administration from reviving it in the future.
That was one reason why, although the deal allowed Blanche to clear the committee, he still had to convince other GOP holdouts. He was not completely successful.
Murkowski cited the potential resurgence of the fund as one of her reasons for opposing Blanche. The fund “is only off the table because this nomination is pending and the Senate has leverage,” she wrote on social media. “Once we vote, that will end, and there is no telling what the future holds.”
Ultimately, Cassidy provided the final vote Blanche needed to overcome Murkowski and Collins’s “no” votes.
“This is not a referendum on President Trump,” Cassidy said in his speech. “It is a decision regarding Mr. Blanche in very specific circumstances.”
The holdouts who eventually gave Blanche their support did not appear thrilled about doing so, and they argued that they extracted as many concessions from the administration as they could. Despite those wins, they also described Blanche as a type of least bad option for the attorney general role.
“I think the DOJ needs Senate-confirmed leadership to prevent some of the chaos and dysfunction over there, and I think Blanche is as good as you’re going to get,” Cornyn told reporters earlier this week.