Todd Blanche faces lingering GOP holdouts for attorney general post over ‘anti-weaponization fund’

Todd Blanche is Trump's own lawyer turned nominee, and he still can't lock down two Republican votes he needs to get out of committee. That should tell you something. Cornyn and Tillis aren't liberal holdouts looking for a reason to vote no. They're asking pointed questions about a fund meant to compensate people supposedly targeted by a weaponized DOJ, a fund that got scrapped, and about how Epstein survivors were treated in the process. Those are not gotcha questions. They're the kind of due diligence a Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to do before handing someone the most powerful law enforcement job in the country.

The instinct on our side is often to close ranks and call any GOP holdout a squish or a saboteur. Sometimes that's fair. This doesn't look like one of those times. If the anti-weaponization fund was real and it got quietly killed, senators deserve a straight answer about why and who benefited from its cancellation. If Epstein survivors got shortchanged in that process, that's not a talking point, that's a real grievance involving real victims, and glossing over it to speed up a confirmation would be its own kind of politics.

There's also a simple accountability argument here. We spent years arguing that DOJ leadership matters, that who runs the department shapes whether justice actually gets applied evenly. You don't get to make that case for four years and then wave through a nominee on vibes and loyalty alone. Cornyn and Tillis holding their votes isn't obstruction. It's them doing the one job the Constitution actually gives them in this process, and Blanche should have to earn it like anyone else.