The Hitchhiker’s Guide to what the Senate did and didn’t do overnight

Confirming Todd Blanche was the easy part. The Senate can always find time to fill a seat when the White House wants a body in it fast. What it apparently can't find time for is the actual legislative work it was sent to Washington to do, which is a pattern by now rather than a bad week.

This is the part of the job nobody wants to touch because it doesn't come with a photo op. Confirmations are clean. You vote, the gavel drops, the person gets sworn in, everybody goes home feeling productive. Appropriations, oversight bills, the unglamorous stuff that actually keeps the government functioning past the next deadline, that requires sitting in a room with people you'd rather not sit with and hashing something out. Senators from both parties would rather leave it for the fall, again, and call the session a win because a nominee got through.

Nobody's arguing the AG shouldn't have been confirmed. But an institution that measures its own success by personnel moves while the harder legislative priorities pile up unresolved is telling on itself. Voters aren't going to remember which nominee cleared committee in August. They're going to remember whether the actual business of the country got handled or got punted again into September, same as it always does.