Trump may pull Blanche nomination amid Senate GOP standoff

Trump said Thursday he may pull Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general until Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina leave office, escalating a fight that has turned the Justice Department post into pressure on two Republican holdouts. The dispute has moved beyond one nominee and now tests how far a president can use an attorney general pick to discipline members of his own party.

The clash centers on a Justice Department anti-weaponization fund tied to a Trump-IRS settlement that multiple outlets have described as nearly $1.8 billion. Cornyn and Tillis want written assurances that Blanche will not revive the fund and want the terms of the tax-claims settlement revised before they back him. Trump’s suggestion that he could withdraw Blanche temporarily and resubmit the nomination later made explicit what Senate Republicans have been saying privately: the White House is treating the confirmation as leverage over individual senators, not just as a vote count.

The Senate Judiciary Committee had been expected to vote on Blanche on July 29, but the vote was postponed or canceled after Cornyn and Tillis objected. That delay followed a July 15 hearing in which Cornyn pressed Blanche on the fate of the anti-weaponization fund. Earlier, on June 4, the Senate defeated a Tillis amendment that would have redirected the proposed fund into anti-fraud enforcement instead.

The maneuver matters because Cornyn and Tillis are both set to leave the Senate next year, making them vulnerable to a pressure campaign that could outlast the current Congress. If the administration can force written concessions on an attorney general nominee before the Senate will act, it would weaken the chamber’s advice-and-consent role and set a precedent in which nominees become bargaining chips in disputes over Justice Department policy. It would also deepen concerns inside the Republican conference about party discipline, since the standoff has been driven not by Democrats but by senators asking for explicit limits on how Blanche would use the department’s power once in office.

The result leaves Blanche caught between a president who wants the nomination advanced and two Republican senators demanding a paper trail that shuts the fund down for good. That unresolved conflict now sits at the center of the confirmation fight.