Senate confirms AG … yes!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The United States finally has a new attorney general … who’s going to serve as the people’s lawyer, not someone who runs political interference for the president of the United States.

Welcome to the fray, Merrick Garland. A weary nation has been waiting for you.

The U.S. Senate voted 70-30 today to confirm Garland. It’s a good news/bad news kind of vote. The good news is that 20 Republicans crossed over to vote for the Democratic president’s nominee; the bad news is that 30 of them stayed on their side of the great divide and voted “no” on a man who is highly regarded as a brilliant and fair-minded legal scholar.

The Texas delegation in the U.S. Senate split on this one: Republican John Cornyn voted to confirm Garland while his fellow GOP colleague, Ted Cruz, voted against. Cruz’s “no” vote, I will venture a guess, likely was cast more out of petulance than principle.

Garland will succeed William Barr, who quit in the final weeks of the Trump administration out of anger over the way Donald Trump conducted himself leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection that Trump incited. The period before that, though, is what troubled so many of us, as Barr acted so much as though he was representing Donald Trump and not the interests of all Americans and the Constitution to which he swore an oath to defend and protect.

I do not believe we are going to have that issue with Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Senate votes to confirm Garland as attorney general | TheHill

This is an important step in the reconstruction of a Justice Department decimated by Donald Trump and his legal eagle minions. Garland pledges to put the people’s interest front and center, that he won’t be bullied or coerced into making political decisions. “I am the United States’s lawyer. I will do everything in my power … to fend off any effort by anyone to make prosecutions or investigations partisan or political in any way,” Garland said during his eight-hour Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing.

You know what? I believe him. I also believe he will restore the DOJ to the level of integrity, fairness and toughness that has been its hallmark. Our government needs that guarantee.