Blanche survives Republican defectors as Trump gets his new attorney general

Todd Blanche's confirmation coming down to the wire in the middle of the night tells you something about where the Republican conference actually stands right now. This wasn't a party-line formality. It was a nail-biter, and it took Bill Cassidy — not exactly a reliable Trump loyalist — stepping in at the last minute to save it. That's not a ringing endorsement of unity. It's a reminder that even on a president's own attorney general pick, there's real friction inside the GOP that doesn't show up in the press releases.

Blanche was Trump's personal defense lawyer before he was his nominee to run the Justice Department. That alone was always going to make some senators queasy, and evidently it did. The defectors aren't named yet in most of the coverage, but the fact that there were enough of them to make this "razor-thin" rather than routine matters. It means the confirmation battles ahead, whether over DOJ personnel or policy direction, aren't going to be automatic wins just because Republicans hold the majority.

Cassidy's role here is worth sitting with. He's a senator who has crossed Trump before, on impeachment, on other votes, and taken heat for it. Whatever calculation brought him around this time, it wasn't blind loyalty. That should reassure people more than it should alarm them. A Senate that occasionally has to be talked into confirming the president's picks, even ones he wants badly, isn't a rubber stamp. It's doing something closer to its job.

Blanche now runs the Justice Department with a mandate that looks a lot thinner than the White House would like to admit. That's fine. Governing with a slim margin tends to keep people honest, and the DOJ could use a little more of that regardless of who's in charge.