Todd Blanche wants to be Attorney General. Senator Thom Tillis wants him to sit in a room with Jeffrey Epstein's victims first. Not because Blanche did anything to them. Because optics demand human sacrifice before confirmation votes.
Two GOP senators are hedging. Hedging is what senators do when they want leverage but lack the spine to say no. They'll extract their meeting. Blanche will nod solemnly for forty minutes. Everyone will pretend this changes something about his qualifications to prosecute federal crimes.
The logic here is f*cked. Blanche represented Trump in criminal cases. That's his crime. Now he has to perform empathy theater with people he never harmed to prove he deserves a job he was already nominated for. It's like making a plumber apologize to flood victims before letting him fix your toilet.
Tillis wants the meeting. Fine. What's Blanche supposed to say? Sorry your lives were destroyed by a different rich guy I never met? Sorry I defended someone you don't like in a completely unrelated matter? The victims deserve better than being used as props in a Senate hold negotiation.
This is confirmation politics. Make the nominee sweat. Demand a public struggle session. Call it accountability. Meanwhile the real question, whether Blanche can actually run the Justice Department, gets buried under performative moral testing that has nothing to do with his record or competence.
Blanche will take the meeting. He'll say the right words. Tillis will declare himself satisfied. The nomination will proceed. And retail traders will somehow find a way to lose money on this news.
Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash
Leave a Comment