Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is facing two potential bumps on the road to full-time confirmation. And their names are John Cornyn and Thom Tillis.
Over the past several days, reporting broke indicating the two Republican senators — who are both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee — have trepidation about advancing Blanche’s nomination to the Senate floor. While slated to consider his nomination on Thursday, the committee postponed a vote on Blanche’s AG bid by a week, as “per standard committee practice,” according to a representative for Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
The reporting suggests that Cornyn and Tillis’ indecision stems from concerns over government “weaponization.” Naturally, they aren’t worried about Democrat weaponization of government, but potential unfavorable actions from a Blanche-led Justice Department.
The outgoing senators are emphatically opposed to the administration’s previously floated $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for victims of Democrat lawfare. In the case of Tillis, the North Carolina Republican is supposedly worried about a weaponized Trump DOJ and even went as far as to compare the Biden administration’s DOJ weaponization to team Trump’s bid to achieve accountability for such abuse.
Yet for all their hesitancy about supporting Blanche’s AG nomination, Cornyn and Tillis seemingly had no problem backing several highly partisan nominees put forward by Democrat presidents — some of whom would go on to abuse their positions to target their political opposition.
A trip down memory lane shows that both GOP senators supported numerous controversial figures nominated by President Joe Biden. This includes voting for Merrick Garland to be attorney general; Antony Blinken to be secretary of state; Pete Buttigieg to be transportation secretary; Janet Yellen to be treasury secretary; and Miguel Cardona to be education secretary.
As attorney general, Garland weaponized the DOJ like no other. Under his watch, the agency attempted to imprison Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election, 2020 election protestors, and pro-lifers and other faithful Christians; spied on Republican members of Congress; and targeted parents protesting unscientific Covid policies and racial indoctrination at school board meetings, to name a few.
At the State Department, Blinken helped spearhead Biden’s less-than-stellar foreign policy agenda. It was later revealed that Blinken — who was working as a Biden campaign official at the time — had contacted intel officials ahead of the 2020 election in an apparent attempt to squash the New York Post’s damning Hunter Biden laptop story.
Meanwhile, Buttigieg abandoned the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, after a terrible train derailment and its resulting chemical burn; Yellen ignored economic concerns amid Democrats’ bid to pass a “massive, cronyist, welfare-state boondoggle using reconciliation;” and Cardona used the Education Department to promote “sexually deviant behavior among children and a racial indoctrination scheme.”
Cornyn also supported the defense secretary nomination of Lloyd Austin — who went MIA without notifying the president, bankrolled travel expenses for service members seeking abortions, and presided over a military recruiting crisis and the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. (Tillis did not vote on Austin’s nomination).
The situation is also bleak when it comes to several of Biden’s activist judicial nominees.
Both Tillis and Cornyn voted for Zahid Quraishi to be a federal district judge in New Jersey. The Biden appointee has seemingly taken to hamstringing the Trump administration’s immigration policies in court.
Tillis also supported the confirmation of New Jersey District Judge Michael Farbiarz. The Biden appointee notably attempted to block the Trump administration’s efforts to deport pro-Hamas foreign activist Mahmoud Khalil — a decision that was later vacated by a federal appellate court.
For Cornyn, the pattern goes back even further to Barack Obama’s presidency.
The Texas Republican voted for his former Senate colleague Hillary Clinton to become Obama’s first secretary of state. The former first lady would go on to preside over the administration’s Benghazi scandal during her time at the State Department. Perhaps more scandalous, however, was her and her presidential campaign’s role in helping advance the infamous Trump-Russia collusion hoax leading up to and following her humiliating 2016 defeat.
A key player in that hoax was none other than FBI Director James Comey, another sordid figure Cornyn voted to confirm to a powerful government position. As The Federalist extensively reported, Comey was instrumental in crafting an Intelligence Community Assessment after the 2016 contest that parroted the weak and uncorroborated claim that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” The ICA would become central to advancing the Clinton-manufactured narrative that Trump colluded with Moscow to steal the 2016 election, with Comey continuing such egregious antics into Trump’s presidency.
[READ: James Comey Will Be Convicted — By History]
Another notable figure that received Cornyn’s support for confirmation is D.C. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg. Confirmed by the Senate in 2011, the Obama appointee has since earned a name for himself in America’s political discourse — and not in a good way.
Not only has Boasberg been a persistent thorn in Trump’s side by issuing overreaching court orders against his administration, but it’s also been revealed that the partisan judge played a key role in Special Counsel Jack Smith‘s lawfare against Trump and other Republicans. As The Federalist previously reported, the Obama appointee signed off on efforts by Smith’s team to seize the phone records of GOP members of Congress and not inform them of such subpoenas.
With votes like these, one could easily argue that Cornyn and Tillis have contributed to the weaponization of government more than figures like Blanche ever have. That by elevating such individuals to the highest levels of government, they helped empower a leftist political class that turned the government against the people and ruined countless lives in the process.
Instead of creating log jams for nominees like Blanche (for likely petty and personal reasons), they should be supporting such figures who will seek accountability for those abuses. It’s the bare minimum they could do.
_(51292913037).jpg){kind=link}