The Confirmation Bait-and-Switch
We never actually opposed Todd Blanche's confirmation. We just pretended to.
Early Saturday morning, the US Senate confirmed Todd Blanche to be our next Attorney General. And while we have been told that the process was grueling, and that Blanche’s confirmation was in doubt for much of it, that simply isn’t the case. He was a lock from day one, and this becomes obvious once we look at the nature of the debate surrounding him. I should explain.
The debate centered around the recent creation and use of what Trump calls “The Anti-Weaponization Fund.” It’s basically just a slush fund used to pay settlements to J6 terrorists. That’s right – he pardoned them, and now he wants to pay them for being insurrectionists. It’s a disgusting turn of events for sure, but is it really more important than securing the release of the Epstein Files? And if the Epstein Files are the priority, as they should be, then why did Blanche’s confirmation not rest entirely on his willingness to release them? And why did we spend the month prior to Blanche’s confirmation talking about anything else?
How did we allow ourselves to be so easily distracted?
To begin, we need to understand the horse race, and how it is sold to us. The horse race focuses on the finish line, which in this case, is the 50th vote – the one that officially confirmed the nominee. That’s the only vote we ever hear about, and this focus is misleading. I mean, why exactly do we focus only on the 50th vote and ignore the first through the forty-ninth?
That first vote, by the way, the first of 50 pro-pedophilia votes in the US Senate on Saturday morning, came from Alan Armstrong, Republican of Oklahoma. He knows, just as we all do, that Todd Blanche has one job and one job only as our next Attorney General, and that is to keep the Epstein Files hidden. Blanche will surely do other corrupt things and break our laws over and over again to serve Trump, but his nomination was always a protection racket first, even though no one, Democrat or Republican, seemed very enthusiastic about having that debate. So instead, we get force-fed a narrative about the “weaponization fund” and Trump’s immunity from tax fraud, and that becomes the public debate instead.
It’s enough to make a thinking citizen believe that neither side really wants the files to be released. After all, any Senator willing to tie their vote to the release of the Epstein Files, whether they are a Democrat or a Republican, would score major points with their constituents back home, since the release of the files is perhaps the most bipartisan issue in America these days. But the Republicans caved right from the start, and the Democrats helped them do so by refusing to make compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act the one and only issue debated during his confirmation.
So instead of engaging in a winning argument and getting Blanche out of there, we created a reason for Senators to vote yes by feeding the public a silly argument about a corrupt slush fund and whether or not Blanche will confirm its demise in writing. Really? Is that at all more important that the largest child sex ring in US history? Well, today it is.
Folks on the left hear a great deal about “weak Democrats” and all that, and honestly, some of it isn’t deserved. But this time around, weak doesn’t quite describe it. And this weakness comes from their complete inability to frame the discussion. For a crystal-clear example, imagine this hypothetical:
Weeks prior to the confirmation vote, Senator Alan Armstrong of Oklahoma, who will cast the first vote in favor of Blache’s nomination, is approached by a reporter as he’s walking to his car. The reporter asks him this question: “Senator, how do you feel about possibly casting the first pro-child sex vote in US Senate history?”
Or this one: “Senator, do you believe pedophilia is wrong, and if so, why would you vote to confirm a known protector of pedophiles?”
His answers would have become the lead story on every channel for days, and the debate would not have been so easily turned into a distraction. If we would have gone after the first vote rather than the 50th, Todd Blanche would not be our Attorney General today.
But we didn’t, so he is.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.
America and Americans are so screwed!