Blanche rescinds fund for Trump allies after senators threaten to block his attorney general bid

Todd Blanche didn't rescind this fund because he suddenly discovered a constitutional objection to it. He rescinded it because two Republican senators had his confirmation votes and weren't going to release them otherwise. That's not a scandal, exactly, but it's worth sitting with for a second: a $1.8 billion program built around compensating the president's political allies got killed not on the merits, but as the price of getting a job.

There's a version of this story where the fund deserved to die anyway. Calling it an "Anti-Weaponization Fund" while structuring it to pay out to Trump allies specifically was always going to invite the obvious question of what exactly it was supposed to fix. If the idea was to remedy people genuinely harmed by politicized prosecutions, fine, make that case in the open and let it survive scrutiny. A fund that reads like a settlement check for the president's friends was never going to hold up, and it shouldn't have taken a Senate hostage situation to notice that.

But the process here matters too. Two senators using a confirmation vote as leverage to kill a specific spending program is exactly the kind of backroom dealmaking this administration's supporters have spent years complaining about when Democrats did it. If the fund was bad policy, kill it on those grounds and say so publicly. If it was good policy, don't let it get traded away in a private negotiation just to grease a nomination through.

Either way, Trump allies who were expecting a payday just watched it evaporate because of Senate math, not principle. That's a strange way to run a government, even when the outcome is the right one.