Committee backs Blanche for attorney general

Todd Blanche cleared the Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, and if you only read the Democratic statements you'd think the republic had been handed over to a criminal enterprise. It wasn't. It was a committee vote, on party lines, sending a nomination to the floor the way nominations have gone to the floor for decades. The theatrics around it tell you more about the minority's strategy than about Blanche himself.

What's actually notable here is how little the objections have to do with his qualifications. Blanche spent years as a federal prosecutor before going into private defense work, which is a résumé, not a scandal. The "vicious denunciations" are aimed at who he represented, not what he'd do running the Justice Department. That's a legitimate thing to debate on the floor, but it's not disqualifying, and every senator casting that vote knows it.

There's a pattern here worth naming plainly: nominees tied to Trump get treated as existential threats before they've done anything in office. It happened with his cabinet picks in the first term, it's happening again now. Voters can see the difference between principled opposition and reflexive theater, and eventually it stops landing.

The full Senate vote this week is where it actually matters, and barring a surprise, Blanche gets confirmed. The denunciations will keep coming regardless of the outcome, because they were never really about persuading anyone. They were about being on record. That's fine as a political tactic, but it shouldn't be confused with a substantive case against the man.