WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Senate Judiciary Committee has once again demonstrated its world-class commitment to thorough, unhurried deliberation by postponing the vote on Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination for the fourth time, a move one committee aide described as “the democratic process working exactly as the Founding Fathers drew it up, but slower.”
Chairman Chuck Grassley’s office confirmed that Wednesday’s scheduled vote has been pushed back to give the White House “more time to secure the votes,” a phrase that constitutional scholars note appears nowhere in the Federalist Papers but has quietly become the Senate’s most beloved procedural tradition.
“The American people deserve an Attorney General who has been vetted with the patience of a monk transcribing scripture,” said Sen. Harlow Finch (R-OH), a supporter of the nominee, speaking to reporters outside the hearing room. “If it takes a fifth postponement, a sixth, a tenth — so be it. Rome wasn’t confirmed in a day.”
At the center of the delay are written assurances two Republican senators have been seeking from the Justice Department regarding a settlement between President Trump and the IRS — an agreement that, according to a federal judge’s recent ruling, may have been, in the judge’s words, “nullified” amid allegations of a “$1.7 billion slush fund” and attorneys referred to the bar for sanctions.
Sen. Finch, who declined to specify which senators were withholding support, characterized the holdout as “healthy skepticism from patriots who simply want to read the settlement’s fine print — all 14,000 pages of it — before entrusting the nation’s top law enforcement job to the man who once described keeping President Trump ‘out of jail for years.’”
Legal experts consulted by Freedom Eagle praised the committee’s approach as a masterclass in governance.
“This is exactly how you confirm a nominee,” said Dr. Miriam Overton, professor of legislative stagnation at Georgetown. “You wait until the political winds shift, the news cycle moves on, and everyone forgets what the original question was. Then you hold the vote in a broom closet during a recess and everyone’s happy.”
The judge in the underlying IRS case was less effusive, describing the settlement as having been “nullified” and suggesting Blanche “could face disciplinary action” for his role — developments that have reportedly made the written assurances somewhat complicated to draft.
At press time, the committee was said to be considering a fifth postponement “out of an abundance of caution,” with one aide noting that the Senate’s calendar had conveniently cleared for the rest of the year.