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Maine Republican Susan Collins announced Tuesday she will vote against confirming Todd Blanche as Attorney General, leaving the Trump administration's pick for the nation's top law enforcement post balanced on a knife's edge — one more Republican defection and Blanche goes down, leaving the Justice Department permanently leaderless except for an acting AG who cannot be confirmed.
Blanche had just survived a critical Senate Judiciary Committee vote Tuesday — the culmination of weeks of drama in which two GOP holdouts, senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, ultimately stood down after reaching a deal with the White House over the controversial anti-weaponization fund. That fund, initially seeded at $1.8 billion from DOJ asset forfeiture accounts, had drawn objections from several Republican senators who feared it could be used as an off-books mechanism to fund political prosecutions without congressional oversight. Blanche agreed to suspend disbursements pending further review — a concession Cornyn and Tillis accepted — and the committee advanced his nomination on a party-line vote, per Fox News and Axios.
Then Collins spoke. Her statement, issued Tuesday evening, did not mince language. "While I believe Mr. Blanche is a capable lawyer, the Department of Justice has become increasingly political," she wrote, per Fox News. "Mr. Blanche has taken several actions that have further eroded the Department's independence, and that is the basis for my vote to oppose his confirmation." She listed specific actions: Blanche's approval of an IRS audit shield protecting President Trump, his sons, and Trump's family from tax scrutiny; the anti-weaponization fund; promises made to anti-abortion organizations that he would attempt to restrict mailed abortion medication; attempted indictments of Democratic senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan over what Collins characterized as "constitutionally protected" speech encouraging resistance to unlawful orders; and pushback from over 1,200 Justice Department career employees who signed statements opposing his leadership.
The math is now brutal for the White House. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats, but Mitch McConnell of Kentucky remains absent due to health issues, meaning the effective working Republican caucus can afford to lose at most two votes without VP JD Vance casting a tie-breaker — and only two if all Democrats oppose Blanche, which is certain. Collins is now one. One more Republican defection, and Blanche fails. Senate Republican leaders say they hope to schedule a floor vote later this week, per Politico, but the vote-counting as of Wednesday morning remains unresolved.
Collins's stated reasons deserve examination on their own terms, separate from the political scorekeeping. The DOJ independence argument is the one legacy media will amplify — it fits the preferred narrative of Blanche as an instrument of Trumpian retribution. But the picture on the ground is more complicated. Some of the specific grievances Collins cited — the IRS audit shield, the anti-weaponization fund, the attempted prosecution of sitting Democratic senators for speech acts — represent exactly the kind of aggressive DOJ posture that Trump's base has demanded for years after watching the Obama and Biden DOJs weaponize federal law enforcement against conservatives with essentially zero accountability. Whether Collins is standing on principle or protecting the institutional arrangements that have protected the uniparty's equities is a question CDM readers should consider carefully.
What is not in doubt is that the Justice Department remains one of the most consequential and most contested departments in the federal government, and that its permanent leadership has been in limbo since Pam Bondi's tenure ended. Blanche has been running the department in an acting capacity — a position that limits his legal authority on certain long-range commitments and leaves ongoing prosecutions and policy initiatives in a state of institutional uncertainty. Every week this confirmation fight drags on is a week the deep-state bureaucracy that populated the DOJ under Biden retains more operational inertia than any election result should permit.
