The working-class case for handing the Justice Department to the president's private fixer

I spent Tuesday morning in the gallery of the Dirksen Senate Office Building watching the Judiciary Committee grill Todd Blanche, and I couldn't help but marvel at the disconnect between Washington and the real world. As Chairman Chuck Grassley so astutely noted from the dais, this is merely a "promotion" for a man who has served his client well. Yet the Democrats and their media allies spent hours grandstanding about "impartiality" simply because Blanche spent the last two years defending Donald Trump in criminal court and is now being asked to imprison his political rivals.

Let’s be honest: the American people are sick and tired of the administrative state’s obsession with the separation of powers. When a hardworking taxpayer hires a plumber to fix a leak, they don’t want a second, government-appointed plumber coming in to independently investigate the pipes, write a report on water flow, and potentially arrest the homeowner for an unpermitted sink. They want the guy on their payroll to quietly make the problem disappear before the inspector arrives. Why should the presidency be any different?

We must also remember that Blanche is not some outside disruptor. He possesses vital executive branch experience, having previously served as Deputy Attorney General under Pam Bondi. He has already spent months walking the halls of the Justice Department, learning exactly which filing cabinets contain the documents he needs to shred, and which career attorneys need to be relocated to a weather monitoring station in the Aleutian Islands. This is institutional knowledge you simply cannot teach.

I recently had lunch with a senior aide close to leadership at a very exclusive Capitol Hill steakhouse, and he framed it perfectly. The DOJ has always been a weapon, he told me over a $110 dry-aged ribeye, but until now, it was a weapon operated by bureaucrats with their own agendas. Todd brings the kind of bespoke, client-first customer service you usually have to pay a thousand dollars an hour for.

Naturally, the ethics hall monitors are hyperventilating. During a brief recess, I asked a prominent legal scholar about the implications of handing the federal law enforcement apparatus to a man whose primary career achievement is keeping his boss out of a concrete cell.

You hear that? Functioning exactly as it would if it purchased a nation-state. Even his harshest critics are forced to admit that Blanche brings a level of operational efficiency we haven't seen in decades.

The optics of the hearing only reinforced this triumph. Senators spent an agonizing amount of time demanding to know if Blanche would release the Epstein client list. This is pure coastal elitism, pushed by a media desperate for clicks. Do you know who doesn't care about the Epstein files? The forgotten men and women of this country. They are worried about the price of groceries, not the reputational damage of fifty to seventy of our most crucial private equity titans, tech visionaries, and political donors. By bravely stonewalling the committee and keeping those names under lock and key, Blanche is single-handedly preventing a catastrophic collapse of the American donor class. That is economic anxiety addressed at its root.

Then came the pearl-clutching over the prospect of prosecuting the president's political rivals. It is honestly exhausting to listen to the left complain about this. For years, they have demanded that the rich and powerful face consequences. Well, who is more rich and powerful than the president's political enemies? By rounding up opposition figures, Blanche will finally be holding the elite accountable, using the full weight of the federal government to deliver populist justice.

The base understands this intuitively. I spoke to an everyday American outside the hearing room who grasped the brilliance of the Blanche appointment immediately.

Exactly. You want a gamekeeper who used to be a poacher, especially when the poacher is still actively employed by the guy who owns the woods.

We are witnessing the ultimate disruption of the DOJ’s bloated bureaucracy. For over two centuries, if a president wanted to unilaterally declare a former cabinet member an enemy of the state, he had to navigate a labyrinth of independent counsels, grand juries, and tedious evidentiary standards. It was a nightmare of red tape. Under the Blanche doctrine, the commander-in-chief just has to text his lawyer a name and a frowny-face emoji, and a SWAT team is dispatched before lunch.

The confirmation of Todd Blanche isn't a threat to democracy. It's a guarantee that democracy will finally be streamlined, vertically integrated, and entirely shielded from the burdens of public discovery. And frankly, if you have a problem with that, you might just be the next person he subpoenas.