The 2024 Vilification of an Attorney General Nominee

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

The infuriating story of the Matt Gaetz nomination is a learning opportunity,

President Trump nominated Congressman Gaetz to be Attorney General, and the deep state understandably went ballistic, because Gaetz doesn’t mind making enemies; he would clearly enjoy doing exactly what needs to be done at the Dept of Justice.

There are four broad categories that must be fixed at Justice:

It has too many bureaus, too many agencies, some of which are outright destructive. Most department heads zealously defend the size of their budgets and sizes, even if they want to retool them. A good AG will make the case to Congress that these destructive offices need to be permanently shut down.

Too many current employees have the wrong priorities – either working on behalf of the criminal element or otherwise unconstitutionally overregulating the areas under their control, such as Justice’s ongoing harassment of good local and state police. A good AG will work to fire as many of these as possible. And the ones we can’t fire, we can defang.

The DoJ is in charge of vetting nominees for federal judgeships. Democrat administrations are notorious for putting malicious, anti-Constitutional Marxists on the federal bench. Republican administrations need to work just as hard. They sometimes only focus on the appeals court and the supreme court, but all federal judgeships are lifetime appointments; every one is critical, especially now that we see how the left wages lawfare. Even a federal judge in the most boring district could be the one to handle the next outrageous attack. Every judge matters.

Finally, the DoJ is filled with malicious actors who use the power of the state to attack innocents with whom they disagree, from a quiet Idaho farmer like Randy Weaver to a former president like Donald Trump. These villains need to be both fired and prosecuted wherever appropriate, and replaced by honorable public servants who will obey the Constitution and honor their duty to uphold the rule of law. A mass firing of all prior US attorneys is standard practice at the beginning of a new administration, but we need much more, a top-to-bottom cleansing of the agency, clearing out the termites in the bureaucracy as well as the obvious political positions.

And all this is in addition to the obvious administrative duty of a cabinet secretary running the day-to-day activities of a busy federal department. None of this is easy, and at Justice, a sea change is imperative.

Consider what an array of offices the AG manages. They operate the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Prisons, the US Marshalls, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the FBI. Then they have dozens of offices that were clearly established for political reasons – offices that separate simple “crime” by the race or sex of the victim, and offices that focus on environment and natural resources, Indian tribes, and anything else that some Congressman managed to slide into a thousand-page spending bill at some point in the past hundred years.

The full list of offices falling under the management of Justice is much longer than most Americans would ever imagine to be in a single cabinet department, and it’s not even the biggest one.

So it’s easy to see why this is no job for a typical politician who wants to be liked. A good attorney general has to be the opposite of Merrick Garland, a cretin who has spent every second of his four years there sowing the seeds of destruction, from promoting the worst possible judicial nominees to siccing his agencies on political rivals, using the power of federal law enforcement to tyrannize the country as if this were a banana republic.

It may be no exaggeration to say that the Department of Justice will need an exorcism when Merrick Garland and his crew are finally expelled.

Upon reflection, we see why Matt Gaetz was a logical choice; despite his years in Congress, he was tough as nails; he never cared if a position or line of argument would make him look good or bad.

And now that he has dropped out of consideration, and President Trump has nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, we have another nominee with the tenacious reputation that the position needs.

But this brings us to the two key lessons of the Gaetz nomination and its fallout.

Matt Gaetz has made plenty of enemies on Capitol Hill, both in Congress and in the bureaucracy, by standing for principle and fighting for Constitutional positions, whether interrogating irresponsible bureaucrats or leading an overthrow of an insufficiently principled Republican Speaker. He has what a good conservative would refer to as “all the right enemies,” of course, but nevertheless, an attempt at Borking him was always likely.

Borking, we will recall, refers to the Democratic Party’s technique of using unfair character assassination to derail a presidential nomination. It began with the attack on Judge Robert Bork, whom President Reagan appointed to the Supreme Court. No more qualified legal mind had ever been appointed, but the Left attacked the president’s nominee without mercy. So President Reagan appointed the more libertarian, possibly less offensive Doug Ginsberg, and they drove him out too, again through outrageous character assassination (they revealed that he had attended a college party where some marijuana was smoked – ooohhh, the horror). Finally, the Reagan administration appointed Anthony Kennedy, the most moderate of the three, and the Left let him through, rejoicing that they had successfully weakened that seat on the Supreme Court through these pernicious techniques.

How different might the past 40 years have looked if Robert Bork had served on the high court instead of the mushier gentleman, Anthony Kennedy? The Left has been patting themselves on the back for that one ever since.

In this current example, unmerited allegations against Matt Gaetz were presented to the DoJ, which investigated them, but ultimately dropped the charges, because there was nothing there (the DoJ doesn’t drop charges against a Republican if they could have gotten a conviction; the only reason this DoJ would drop those charges is if they were in fact meritless). So the House Ethics Committee used those same rejected charges to open a case against Gaetz in the House, where the rules of evidence are easier to get around, and you can commit character assassination simply by saying “There are ethics charges against him!” without ever having to have an unpleasant trial at which the non-evidence would be exposed.

The President must take two courses of action, and both are critical:

First, Matt Gaetz must be raised up, not knocked down. He needs to either be appointed to the Senate or appointed to a major administration post that doesn’t need Senate approval, so that the Left will have failed to destroy their target. We need to recall the classis Star Wars moment at which Darth Vader kills Obiwan Kenobe: “Strike me down, and I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”

And second, the eventual nominee must be even more of a pit bull than Matt Gaetz would have been. Pam Bondi shows great promise, but this is a high standard. Her broad experience holding the same office at the state level would indicate that she’s readier for the administrative side of the job than Gaetz was. But will she be the tenacious fighter on the office’s other challenges? It’s possible, and we must certainly hope so.

Because the only way to stop the Left from Borking our best nominees is if we always take this approach. Fight until they’re confirmed if possible, but if not – if they succeed in defeating the nomination – then we must both elevate the person they beat, and select ever-tougher replacement nominees every time.

The American people deserve to see the concept of Borking brought to an end. And the only way to stop the Left from doing it is if they realize, every time, that the first choice is the best nominee they’re going to get, and if they knock this one off, they’ll always be sure to regret doing so.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo