Todd Blanche is a crook and the Senate is crooked for pretending he's anything else

The Senate confirmation hearing for Donald Trump's former legal fixer turned, now, Trump-nominated U.S. Attorney General did not go well. But it was never going to go well, because the Senate gave up most of its oversight responsibilities a long while back and has been offloading whatever it already hasn't on a daily basis.

The way you can tell that this is all just performance art is that there has been nothing, not a damn thing, absolutely nothing in any of these nominees' histories to knock the votes of Republican apparatchiks from yes to no. Donald Trump could nominate a dog for a cabinet position, and the dog could spend the whole of its Senate confirmation hearing biting senators and peeing on their chairs, and the final vote count would still fall on the party line or something close to it, depending on how many senators bled out before they got to the voting part.

That would never happen, of course. Donald Trump hates dogs. Donald Trump would never nominate any creature not motivated primarily by compulsive greed and a desire to be humiliated, and since he has access to an unending parade of such creatures in the Mar-a-Lago buffet rooms he will never have a need to nominate anyone more than a table away.

The takeaway from the Blanche confirmation hearing isn't that Blanche is or isn't fit for one of the most powerful—and dangerous—positions in the country. The takeaway is that the Senate is grotesquely unfit, no longer capable of carrying out even its most basic constitutional duties, and that unfitness stems not from any structural fault of the Senate but as consequence of electing decades' worth of shitty, unfit people and plopping them down to mug for the television cameras.

Look, right here. You can see the exact moment it became obvious to every sentient mammal that Todd Blanche was unfit for the office Trump is trying to stuff him into.

That should have been the ballgame, if the Senate were still a true government body and not a roach trying valiantly to scurry under Trump's shoe. Really the only non-negotiable qualification for the Attorney General position is a belief that the Department of Justice must not be a tool of partisan politics. The legal knowledge, the courtroom experience, an ability to manage a staff the size of most nation's militaries—that all can be worked around, with the right underlings and temperament.

A keen awareness that the job is not to be used as a petty authoritarian's weapon against his political foes, however: That one is existential. That is the essence of a true democracy, and if you don't have that you don't actually have a democracy, or a republic, or anything else other than a coup in waiting. When you are interviewing for one of the top positions in a democratic republic and you cannot commit to the position that the president has no business ordering prosecutions of his electoral enemies, you are done. We can stop right there.

If, of course, we were a true democracy. We are not, and the Senate itself explicitly does not want us to be one, and that's why the hearing continued even after Blanche soiled himself.

It didn't used to be this way. The George W. Bush Department of Justice got itself into several of the worst non-war scandals of the era when it was perceived as prioritizing partisan loyalty over competence; then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was pressured by the Senate into resigning for it. Now the corruption is both far more blatant and, in the Senate, celebrated as a birthright of their party and only their party, and here we are.

The rest of Blanche's testimony was irrelevant, but much of it was similarly disqualifying. All Republican senators and many Democratic ones danced around the true issue here, which is that Todd Blanche has used the government positions he was already given to engage in an orgy of out-and-out crookery, all of it for the purposes of helping Donald Trump and harming whoever might stand in Donald Trump's way.

Blanche was the one who re-"interviewed" sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein's partner in his crimes, an interview that transpired as pressure mounted to release Justice Department information about Trump's own possible criminal involvement. Accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell was already proven to be a liar by the court that convicted her, and immediately after procuring a new untrustworthy assurance of Trump's supposed innocence, Blanche ordered the sex predator be transferred out of her prison cell and into a minimum security facility.

None of it passes as coincidental, accidental, or double-somersault-good-actually because there's an unending list of these acts on Trump's obvious behalf. It's widely understood, inside Trump's Justice Department, that the department exists to serve Trump first and do the rest of its duties second, and the reason it is widely understood is because the Republican Senate, a captured body of fascist aspirants, allowed the government-wide purge of anyone who thought otherwise.

Now we have a personalist regime that revolves around making Dear Leader feel good and look good. All the time. In every pissy little detail.

One of the most significant episodes of Blanche's systemic corruption came to a head just last Monday, when the federal judge overseeing the supposed Trump "lawsuit" against Trump's own "government" issued a determination of This Whole Thing Was Crooked And Everyone Involved Is A Crook. The Senate ought to have read that opinion in its entirety before settling into their confirmation hearing chairs, because it makes for good reading and makes an irrefutable case that Trump and Blanche conspired to come to an illegal "settlement" giving Trump and family immunity against what's guessed to be as much as $100 million in past tax fraud while prying another $1.8 billion from taxpayers in a slush fund designed to pay off the insurrectionists, both lawyerly and violent, who tried to topple the government at Trump's behest.

The scheme was so crooked that the federal judge both nullified the fake "settlement" and referred Blanche to the New York state bar orchestrating it. Two days later he's before the Republican-held Senate making the case that he should be installed to keep the scheme running.

So yes, all of this is hopelessly corrupt.

On the part of the Senate.

Which is watching all of this unfold and which, on the Republican side, thinks all of it is good and is worth backing. It is corruption that says people who rape teenagers should be protected, so long as they are in good party standing. It is corruption that says the party leader ought to be able to use the government as slush fund to pay off those willing to violently attack lawmakers who have displeased him.

And if Sen. Lindsey Graham were still alive, he'd be in front of the television cameras already, crocodile tears in his eyes, raging against the indecency of pointing out all that blindingly crooked shit Blanche has already done. That is the Senate, now. Not a governing body in any sense of the word, but a collection of circus animals that have been taught to do tricks and that will get beaten if they don't do them to their keeper's satisfaction.

This was all a waste of time. I don't mean the Blanche hearings, I mean the Senate itself. The moment we started to see it collapse into its current "world's worst brothel" form, we ought to have been coming up with ways to detach it from the country. We could put it on an ice floe; we could turn it into the all-hours podcast it so desperately wants to be.

We really cannot forget any of this, when the opportunities to dole out consequences arrive. Each of the senators who turned themselves into footstools for Dear Leader should be recognized for only that, both now and on their footstool-shaped gravestones. The foundational premise that in a democracy, elected leaders are not allowed to use the powers of government to oppress their opponents is so basic that we can't claim any of the senators now undermining it are still senators; their oath and deeds preclude it.

The man is crooked. The man was put in government to be crooked. The only people who don't have a problem with that are crooks themselves.