Senate confirms Trump pick Todd Blanche as new attorney general

Todd Blanche is now attorney general, and the notable part of this story isn't the confirmation vote itself, it's that phrase buried in the coverage: "headwinds President Trump created for his own nominee." That's a strange sentence to have to write about a president confirming his own pick. Usually the White House smooths the runway for its nominees. Here, apparently, the runway had potholes the administration dug itself.

We don't know all the details of what caused the friction, and neither, frankly, does most of the press pretending otherwise. But it's worth sitting with the fact that Senate Republicans still got Blanche through. That's a party doing its job even when the principal actor makes it harder than it needed to be. Confirmation fights are supposed to be about qualifications and fitness for the job, not about managing static from your own side.

Blanche has been in Trump's orbit as a defense attorney and deputy AG nominee before this, so he's not a mystery pick pulled from nowhere. The Justice Department has had a rough few years of being treated as a political football by both parties, and whoever runs it next inherits that mess regardless of who created the turbulence getting him there. The job now is straightforward: run DOJ competently, keep politics out of prosecutorial decisions where you can, and prove the doubters wrong on both sides. Confirmation was the easy part. Everything after this is where it actually counts.