Rebel Republican Senator Prepares to Block Another Trump Nominee

Outbound Republican Senator Thom Tillis has warned that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is in “dangerous waters.”The retiring North Carolina lawmaker promised early Thursday to stand in the way of Blanche’s confirmation if he’s tapped to take over the lead Justice Department role.Tillis was reacting to comments that Blanche made at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, in which America’s temporary top cop boasted about how he “cleaned house” and fired federal prosecutors who had worked to convict cases relating to the 2021 Capitol riot. At the time, Blanche also boasted about the mass Inauguration Day 2025 pardon that Donald Trump issued to his supporters who participated in the bedlam, claiming that “when folks say ‘you’ve done nothing,’ I say you have a very short memory.”Tillis has the power to block any nominee before the Senate Judiciary Committee: as long as all Democrats are united against a nominee, Tillis’s vote is enough to tip the scales. And he plans to wield that power against Blanche if it comes down to it. In an interview with Semafor Thursday, Tillis said that “the principle here is that anybody who didn’t back the blue on January 6th is disqualified from consideration for me in the Judiciary Committee.”He added that Blanche is “not a politician in his current state. But when you start acting like a politician, you get treated like one.”“The more recent comments are really what drew my attention,” Tillis told Semafor. “So that I have to parse through. The minute you give somebody slack, then you’ve lost the principle, right?”Blanche joined the Trump band camp in 2023, when he was hired as Trump’s defense attorney in his criminal trials. However, Blanche has since risen through the ranks of the second Trump administration, first as Pam Bondi’s number two and then by landing in the vacancy left behind by her firing. Bondi was ousted earlier this month for failing to break the parameters of American government in order to unquestionably do Trump’s bidding, specifically with regards to prosecuting Trump’s political enemies and handling the Epstein files, which remain Trump’s biggest and indelible scandals to date.In her wake, it seems that Blanche has learned the lesson. In the few short weeks since he became acting attorney general, Blanche has worked overtime to please the president. He has accelerated investigations into Trumpian conspiracies, fired prosecutors who enforced laws that protected abortion clinics, defended the White House’s intimate involvement in DOJ affairs, and initiated a controversial indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center for aiding local and federal law enforcement investigating political extremism.“Blanche knows Trump wants action in the cases Trump has publicly targeted,” John Fishwick, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia, told MS NOW. “It is always a challenge to audition for a job for Trump, but Blanche is moving the chessboard at DOJ to try and get results that will satisfy the president.”