Blanche confirmed Attorney General 50-49 as two Republicans vote no

The Senate confirmed Todd Blanche, of Florida, as Attorney General by a vote of 50-49 at 4:17 a.m. on 8 August 2026, on nomination PN1078; the Senate had invoked cloture on the nomination by the same 50-49 margin earlier that day.¹² Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were the two Republicans voting no, joining every Democrat and both independents; Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky did not vote.¹ Blanche “was sworn in as the 88th Attorney General of the United States on August 10th, 2026,” according to the Department of Justice, which lists his dates of service as “2026 - Present”; the Department’s list of former Attorneys General records his predecessor, Pamela J. Bondi, as “2025 to 2026.”³⁴ He moves up from Deputy Attorney General, the position to which the President appointed him at the start of the second term.³ The Department’s biography records that Blanche spent nearly fifteen years at the Department earlier in his career — as a contractor, a paralegal in the Criminal Division, and at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he became an Assistant United States Attorney and later a supervisor — and that after leaving he “worked as a defense attorney that included representing President Donald Trump in three of the criminal cases brought against him in 2023 and 2024.”³

1. The vote crossed party lines in one direction only. Bondi was confirmed 54-46 on 4 February 2025, with Senator John Fetterman the only Democrat voting yes (see Bondi confirmed Attorney General 54-46).⁵ Blanche drew four fewer yes votes on a margin of one rather than eight, and the crossings ran the other way: Fetterman voted no, and Collins and Murkowski broke from the majority, leaving a tally that would have failed had one more senator in the majority voted the other way.¹⁵ The Senate had confirmed Walter Clayton as Director of National Intelligence 51-47 eleven days earlier (see Senate confirms Clayton as DNI 51-47; handover set for Monday).⁶

2. Elevating the Deputy Attorney General moves the Department’s second officer into the top job and empties the position the statute designates as its backstop. Under 28 U.S.C. § 508(a), in a vacancy in the office of Attorney General “the Deputy Attorney General may exercise all the duties of that office, and for the purpose of section 3345 of title 5 the Deputy Attorney General is the first assistant to the Attorney General”; § 508(b) puts the Associate Attorney General next and allows the Attorney General to designate the Solicitor General and Assistant Attorneys General in further succession.⁷ Filling the principal office by promoting from the deputy’s chair therefore converts one vacancy into another at the position the statute names first, and the Senate held no further recorded votes after 8 August.⁷⁸

3. The new Attorney General is named personally in the operative provisions of two contested executive orders. Executive Order 14399 § 2(b) directs the Attorney General to “prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of State and local officials or any others involved in the administration of Federal elections who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election,” and its section 5 directs the Attorney General and agency heads to take “all lawful steps to deter and address noncompliance with Federal law.”⁹ Executive Order 14418 § 3(a) names the Attorney General among the officers who must conform their departments’ regulations to its citizenship carve-outs, with public guidance due within 30 days of 6 August — two days before the confirmation vote and four days before the swearing-in (see Executive order directs federal citizenship lists and a Postal Service ballot rulemaking and Two executive orders name four categories outside Barbara’s rule).⁹¹⁰

4. Prior representation of the President in criminal matters sits against the Department’s own disqualification rule, which has no obvious application to its head. 28 C.F.R. § 45.2(a) bars an employee from participating in a criminal investigation or prosecution where he has a “personal or political relationship” with a person or organisation “substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution,” or with one “which he knows has a specific and substantial interest that would be directly affected by the outcome.”¹¹ The section defines a “personal relationship” as “a close and substantial connection of the type normally viewed as likely to induce partiality,” presumed only as to a parent, sibling, child or spouse, and a “political relationship” as a close identification with an elected official, candidate, party or campaign organisation “arising from service as a principal adviser thereto or a principal official thereof.”¹¹ Subsection (b) routes any disqualification through the employee’s “supervisor at the level of section chief or the equivalent or higher,” who may authorise participation in writing on two stated findings — a mechanism that presupposes a supervisor within the Department, which the Attorney General does not have.¹¹ Subsection (d) states that the section “pertains to agency management and is not intended to create rights enforceable by private individuals or organizations.”¹¹