Cory Booker rips Todd Blanche’s AG bid and corruption: ‘World’s greatest presidential tax cheat’

Cory Booker calling Trump the "world's greatest presidential tax cheat" is the kind of line that gets clipped for cable news and forgotten by dinner. It's punchy. It's also not an argument about Todd Blanche, which is supposedly what this confirmation hearing is about. Blanche was Trump's defense lawyer. Now he wants to run the Justice Department. That's a legitimate thing to interrogate, his independence, his prior client, whether he can prosecute cases his old boss might not like. Booker skipped past all of that to relitigate Trump's taxes for the hundredth time.

That's the pattern with a lot of this opposition. When Democrats had actual leverage, actual majorities, actual subpoena power, the big swings never landed the way they promised. Impeachments failed. Investigations fizzled. Now, in the minority, the rhetoric gets louder precisely because the tools are gone. Calling colleagues cowards for not stopping something you yourself couldn't stop when you had the votes is a strange kind of oversight lecture.

None of this means Blanche shouldn't get tough questions. He should. A former personal attorney to a president sitting atop DOJ is a real conflict-of-interest conversation, and Republicans owe the country a straight answer on how that gets managed. But Booker didn't ask that question. He performed outrage instead, and performance is easy when you're not the one who has to govern with the answer.