The Oversight Hoax

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Understanding why politicians do what they do is easy. Usually.

 

A few are ideologues and act on principle. Many are venal and prioritize keeping donors happy. Nearly all are partisans who will support their tribe as needed. And most are cowards who fear losing their office more than they fear harming the country. They’ll often act as their base demands even when those demands are perverse.

 

What’s confounding about how Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis handled Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general is that none of those motives legibly explains their actions.

 

The Blanche saga ended with a whimper late Sunday night when the nominee posted a signed document purporting to rescind the “cash for MAGA criminals” slush fund that his Justice Department colluded with the president to create. A second document—unsigned—specified that a separate agreement between the DOJ and Donald Trump granting the president immunity from any tax crimes he may have committed applies retroactively, not to future offenses that the leader of the free world might commit.

 

And it clarified that that immunity applies only to the president, his sons, and the Trump Organization, not to all members of the extended Trump royal family or its many influence-peddling ventures.

 

Superficially this was a “win” for Cornyn and Tillis, who announced this morning that they now support Blanche’s nomination.

 

The two had said they wouldn’t advance Blanche through the Senate Judiciary Committee without the sort of formal assurances he provided on Sunday night. And they stood firm on that point all last week amid multiple presidential tantrums on Truth Social, taking full advantage of their lame-duck status. Tillis is retiring at the end of this year, remember, having chosen to leave Congress “voluntarily” rather than be humiliated by a Trump-backed challenger in a Senate primary. Cornyn took his chances and was indeed humiliated by Trump’s preposterously corrupt candidate of choice, Ken Paxton, in a primary in Texas.

 

In other words, three of the usual four motives that drive politicians plainly don’t apply to Cornyn and Tillis. They’re at no risk of losing a primary. They owe nothing to their partisan tribe, which chased them out of politics at Trump’s behest. And they no longer need to prioritize keeping the Republican donor class happy.

 

Even if you believe that they’d like to remain in the good graces of that donor class in retirement for social or financial reasons, it still doesn’t explain why they approached Blanche’s nomination the way they did. They could have kept their heads down and supported him from the jump like most other Senate Republicans did, without the Sturm und Drang of demanding concessions on the slush fund and Trump’s tax immunity.

 

By process of elimination, then, it must be that the two were acting on principle, out of earnest ideological objection to one of the most blatantly corrupt acts in the history of the federal government. As a matter of civic conscience, they used what was left of their declining power as senators to make sure Trump and Blanche wouldn’t get away with an in-plain-sight heist of taxpayer money to reward criminal sociopaths with the right politics.

 

But no. Clearly that’s not what happened here either.

 

The rescission scam.

 

Cornyn and Tillis wanted something in writing from Blanche about the slush fund before proceeding with his nomination, and that’s what they got. They got “something.”

 

What they didn’t get was a binding rescission. As many others have noted today, the original settlement that established the fund specified that it “may be modified only with the written agreement of the Parties.” The parties to that instrument were the DOJ, the IRS, and Donald Trump. Blanche can’t rescind it unilaterally.

 

And given that the president continues to babble excitedly about the idea of enriching “victims” of Joe Biden’s Justice Department, I’m guessing his written consent won’t be forthcoming.

 

So Blanche’s concession to Cornyn and Tillis is fake on its own terms. Andy McCarthy predicted it in a piece published a few days ago at National Review, in fact, anticipating that the DOJ would try to appease the two Senate holdouts with something signed by the acting attorney general yet conspicuously not co-signed by the other parties to the settlement. “The question is whether it, or something like it, would be enough to convince the reluctant senators to get in line,” he noted disdainfully. We have our answer.

 

To dwell on the absurdity of Blanche’s “rescission” is to miss the larger absurdity of this process, though. Why would Cornyn and Tillis rely on the good faith of the same official who connived with Trump to hatch the slush fund and tax-immunity deal in the first place?

 

It’s tantamount to catching him accepting a bribe and vowing that he won’t be confirmed—unless he returns the money he was bribed with. In that scenario, by definition, they’d be voting to place a bribe taker in charge of federal law enforcement. So too here: Even if we pretend that Sunday night’s fake rescission isn’t fake, what reason is there to think Blanche won’t strike a new deal with Trump reestablishing the slush fund 10 minutes after he’s confirmed?

 

Or that the two won’t re-create the fund as a “sue and settle” scheme in which MAGA goons are asked to file civil complaints against the DOJ in court instead of applying to a standalone fund to receive their cash-for-criminals check?

 

Naiveté alone can’t explain this degree of gullibility from Cornyn and Tillis, particularly considering that Senate Republicans have been burned several times already by Trump nominees who promised to behave if confirmed and then spent every waking moment betraying that trust. Sen. Bill Cassidy lived to regret (sort of) voting for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead America’s health bureaucracy and Tillis lived to regret supporting Pete Hegseth at defense. Yet now, somehow, here we are again.

 

You’ve heard the saying “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” What should we make of people who agree to be fooled a third time?

 

Congress as spectator.

 

We still haven’t grasped the full absurdity of this episode, though.

 

It’s ludicrous beyond belief that John Cornyn, a former state supreme court justice, would use the leverage he’s acquired by dint of retirement to insist that Blanche merely narrow the beneficiaries of tax immunity under the settlement to Trump, his children, and his business rather than rescind that too in its entirety. That seems to be Cornyn’s version of a sensible compromise: Congress will let the president and his closest kin commit tax crimes with impunity, knowing that any other American would face prison for the same offenses, but letting his extended family do so is where any self-respecting constitutional republic draws the line.

 

The brief Senate standoff over Blanche “illustrated a defining characteristic of Mr. Trump’s second term: A president’s personal interest, along with public interest, is now a factor in governing,” the New York Times marveled last week. Cornyn and Tillis evidently have no problem with that in principle, only with whether the extent of Trump’s greed in a given matter seems reasonable or excessive.

 

It’s even more ludicrous that the two—honest-to-God legislators, empowered to enact rules that bind the Justice Department—would stoop to begging Todd Blanche to renounce the slush fund instead of moving a bill themselves to kill it. To say that a bill of that sort would stand no chance of drawing a veto-proof majority in the House and Senate is true but irrelevant: The immense corruption of most congressional Republicans in enabling Trump’s sociopathy is no excuse for dissidents in the two chambers not to use the leverage they wield to block legislative business until an obscenity like the slush fund is dispatched.

 

In pleading with Blanche to use his authority to fake-rescind the slush fund instead of using their own authority to actually rescind it, Cornyn and Tillis ironically turned what was supposed to be a show of spine into a sort of lab experiment demonstrating how pitifully beaten down Congress has been by postliberalism. From tariffs to Iran to looting the U.S. Treasury on behalf of cop-beating insurrectionists, even the “mavericks” in our legislature sit idly by and hope for the best while the executive seizes its various powers.

 

And never forget, in case all of that wasn’t embarrassing enough: Blanche will remain acting attorney general whether he’s confirmed or not. Rejecting him would have cost Trump nothing, yet Cornyn and Tillis still couldn’t do it. Last week Tillis was actually reduced to pretending that some mysterious unnamed “personal advisor” to the president was stopping the DOJ from rescinding the slush fund when everyone but everyone knows who the real culprit was.

 

The best I can do here to be charitable to Tillis is to imagine that he thought the president, being a psychologically damaged child, wouldn’t allow the Justice Department to make concessions as long as this dispute was being framed as a test of wills between himself and the Senate. By pitting himself against a phantom “adviser” instead, Tillis gave Trump political space to, ahem, override that adviser.

 

The less charitable explanation is that Tillis is afraid to confront Trump directly even now, with retirement looming, and his acceptance of the DOJ’s phony rescission proves it.

 

But either way, there’s nothing about this that amounts to “acting on principle.”

 

Volunteering as rubes.

 

I’ve reckoned with Tillis’ and Cornyn’s motives before, but considering how this episode has ended, I’m at even more of a loss to explain them now.

 

Given the near certainty that Blanche will resurrect the fund in some form after he’s confirmed and the absolute certainty that he’ll embarrass the Senate with other corrupt and vindictive abuses of power, agreeing to confirm him amounts to the two senators essentially volunteering to be seen as rubes in hindsight.

 

They could have hidden in the crowd of other Senate Republicans by agreeing to confirm him from the start, unconditionally. Playing it the way they did, stepping forward to demand that he promise to be a good boy and then accepting magic beans in return, means they’ll “own” Blanche’s future sins politically in the same way that Cassidy owns Kennedy’s. They’ve acquired a degree of moral complicity in his behavior going forward that they wouldn’t have had if they had backed him without first making a fuss.

 

Maybe they did it for their Republican colleagues? They might not care about the party writ large anymore, but they probably do care about the electoral fortunes of friends like Sen. Susan Collins. Perhaps they wanted to show voters in Maine and beyond that a Senate run by the GOP can and will push back on Trump a little—without pushing back so much as to defeat Blanche, which might alienate right-wing voters on whom incumbents like Collins are counting.

 

But that doesn’t make sense. Watching the Senate confirm Blanche, Trump’s slush-fund enabler, will probably hurt Collins on balance in a state as blue as Maine. (It won’t surprise me if she ends up voting no, provided that the GOP doesn’t need her for a majority.) Democrats there will treat it as QED proof of why the White House will never face meaningful oversight from Congress until Democrats are in charge.

 

Besides, how many Republican voters even know who the attorney general is, let alone are so invested in his status that their decision to vote this fall will turn on it? What sort of partisan cares deeply about whether Todd Blanche continues to run the Justice Department with or without the word “acting” in front of his title?

 

My best attempt to explain Cornyn and Tillis is that they always intended to support this nomination for knee-jerk partisan tribal reasons but felt obliged by their lame-duck status to make some token show of resistance to it. They’re old-guard institutionalist Republicans (which is why they’re out of a job) and so they probably found the idea of the Senate rubber-stamping a figure as grossly unfit as Blanche unseemly. Their colleagues had little choice but to meekly acquiesce—they still answer to Trump and his morally bankrupt voters, after all—but the retirees in the chamber no longer do.

 

So the two found a middle way that happens to reflect the traditional conservative establishment’s general approach to Trumpism dating back to 2016. They made noises about their own authority and holding Trump accountable, and then they rolled over and gave him everything he wanted anyway. That’s what being an “institutionalist” means in a party eroded by fascist sensibilities: Occasionally one must insist on a simulacrum of separation of powers, as a nod to the Founding vision, before completely capitulating.

 

It amounts to a hoax. Trump and Blanche engineered a hoax legal settlement as a pretext for the slush fund and tax-immunity deal, and Cornyn and Tillis enabled it by engineering a hoax form of congressional “oversight” in which the Senate pretends to do its job of checks and balances while letting the president get away with murder anyway. Both Blanche and his corrupt arrangement with the president now have a patina of legitimacy courtesy of the “vetting” done by the two senators that they didn’t have last week.

 

Forced to decide between looking like eager rubber stamps for an unqualified attorney general and looking like rubes when Blanche inevitably double-crosses them on the slush fund, Cornyn and Tillis likely concluded that rube status would be slightly less undignified for their political legacies. We’re not corrupt, we’re just suckers: Such are the choices one faces when, for whatever reason, voting no isn’t an option.

 

Limited hangout.

 

It’s fitting that, while the Blanche oversight hoax was playing out this weekend, the top legal story in the country was Todd Blanche’s DOJ being forced to admit that it railroaded an innocent man.

 

Late Friday afternoon, the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, led by Jeanine Pirro, withdrew its indictment of a bystander who was seen handling a piece of debris floating in the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool. That indictment was obtained on July 2 and accused the defendant of felony vandalism, conveniently buttressing Trump’s narrative that problems with the pool were due to sabotage by political enemies rather than a botched renovation carried out by the crony to whom he awarded a no-bid contract. Pirro herself appeared on Fox News to trumpet the vandalism claim, citing “tremendous evidence.”

 

By mid-July, major newspapers were able to explain in elaborate detail how the renovation had failed and why pieces of material were surfacing in the pool. By late July, Pirro’s office reportedly received documents from the Department of the Interior (which was overseeing the project) confirming a “flawed installation by the contractor” due to “the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America250 celebration.” That’s what led to Friday’s motion to dismiss—and, naturally, that motion to dismiss led to another presidential tantrum, as well as to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum doubling down on the vandalism claim despite the defendant’s exoneration.

 

Why was an indictment sought before Pirro’s office was sure that it had all of the relevant information about the renovation from Interior? What does Blanche intend to do to punish her and other attorneys on the case for needlessly and recklessly subjecting an innocent person to MAGA opprobrium? What kind of culture has he created at the DOJ in which supporting the president’s political narratives takes precedence over the human cost of filing charges backed by weak evidence?

 

The worst part of the oversight hoax that Cornyn and Tillis concocted on Blanche’s behalf is that, intentionally or not, it redirected public attention away from the 8,000 or so other reasons he’s unfit to lead the Justice Department—like the reflecting pool matter—and refocused it on a single controversy. And coincidentally (or, again, not), that single controversy turned out to be a rare case in which retreating turned out to be relatively easy for Trump and the DOJ.

 

The president and nominee didn’t need to swear off persecuting their political nemeses or handing out pardons to every tapped-in degenerate in the Bureau of Prisons. The question of Blanche’s fitness, to hear Cornyn and Tillis tell it, turned entirely on whether he was willing to give them “something in writing” on their one pet grievance. And, surprise: He was.

 

That’s what PR pros call a “limited hangout”—conceding the truth of some modestly embarrassing piece of information in hopes that doing so will steer public curiosity away from the really embarrassing stuff that no one knows about. That’s what Cornyn and Tillis achieved with Blanche, magically transforming the most comprehensively corrupt Justice Department in American history into a story about one obnoxious slush fund and Todd Blanche’s willingness to halfheartedly pretend to be contrite about it.

 

When the history of this period is written, let’s hope the authors have the sense to understand that it wasn’t the Trumps and Blanches who made it possible, it was the Cornyns and Tillises. Decline is a choice, as they say, and they chose it.