America, We Have A Damn Attorney General

Jesus God finally.

Wow, y'all, some things HAPPENED today. The House passed its ginormous COVID relief bill by a final vote of 220 to 211, which shows you how tight the House is right now. On top of all the other wonderful   things the bill does, you may have some money coming to you if you meet the income requirements!

Marcia Fudge was confirmed as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and she officially quit Congress today so she's free to go be that.

Oh yeah, and at long last, we have a damn attorney general. The Senate confirmed Merrick Garland today by a vote of 70 to 30. Now maybe we can start hearing from the FBI and Justice Department occasionally about what is going on with their investigation into the domestic terrorist attack Donald Trump incited on the US Capitol. Two of the "nay" votes, unsurprisingly, were from Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, the two senators who did the most to help Trump push the fascist Big Lie that aided and abetted the terrorists on January 6.

Also voting against Garland's confirmation were many of the Senate's other stupidest Republicans, you didn't ask for a fucking list and we're not providing one.

Garland has quite a lot of shit to do now that he's confirmed, so he'd better hop and skip over to the DOJ as soon as he's sworn. No Netflixing and chilling tonight or ever again, MERRICK.

He's got to deal with the aforementioned domestic terrorist investigation, and all the other domestic extremism/terrorism situations we have in America, which is what he said he's going to be focused on as AG. He should be good at that, since he handled the Oklahoma City bombing and the Unabomber bombings. He also told the Senate in his confirmation hearings that he's committed to fighting discrimination against Americans on all fronts. That means he has to effectively reverse every shitty and racist and homophobic and transphobic thing the Trump DOJ ever did, tasks the DOJ has already made some headway on even without a confirmed AG.

Expect his first briefing to be about the Capitol attack, obviously.

And of course, Garland comes into a DOJ that's a shell of its former self, after Donald Trump spent four years using it as his personal plaything, most recently with Bill Barr doing everything he could to make sure that neither Trump nor any of his criminal friends would ever face accountability for their actions, while using the department as a battering ram against Trump's enemies. God even knows what abandoned investigations into Trump criminals he's going to find lying around.

What is that going to be like? We kinda wish we could be a fly on the wall, following him around on his first day.

Oh yeah, and obviously he has to pick up where Barr left off and let now-special counsel John Durham finish his investigation into OBAMAGATE, which is the BIGGEST CRIME, which is OBAMAGATE. You betcha.

 More from the Washington Post on all the shit Garland gotta do now:

Garland, for example, will have to craft a new criminal charging policy for the Justice Department, after Biden's acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, took what he called the "interim" step of revoking the Trump-era directive that prosecutors should seek the most serious, provable charges.

Garland also will likely have to decide what posture the Justice Department will take on implementing the federal death penalty, which had been paused in the Obama administration but resumed under Trump. Garland has signaled he is open to a pause, and that it would be within Biden's purview to order as much.

Garland also has suggested he would favor a relaxation of the department's pursuit of marijuana cases in states where the substance is legal, and has suggested he favors again using court-enforced consent decrees to spur changes at local police departments, a tactic the Trump administration had all but abandoned. Such changes would push the department leftward and likely draw some conservative criticism.

And so on and so on and so on. Of all the federal agencies of the United States government, the Department of Justice is the one that seems to us to have most obviously and completely been destroyed during the Trump years. (Close runner-up is "all the other ones.")

If Wonkette has one piece of advice for Garland — shut up, Wonkette has been advising attorneys general since the Washington administration! — it is that if he is still feeling the SLIGHTEST BIT annoyed over what Mitch McConnell did to his rightful Supreme Court seat in 2016, he ought to take a second look at those criminal referrals the Transportation Department inspector general sent over on McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao. You know, at least just to scare 'em. Obviously we don't think he should do anything with them, unless DOJ can totally prove she's a gigantic criminal and not just a professional grifter, in which case, OK fine, do something with them.

Oh also, second piece of advice is that perp walks of former Trump officials are still VERY hot in America, so popular, everyone will watch, five stars!

OK, we'll stop advising the attorney general. He needs to learn how to do this job without our help, after all!

Anyway, point is, we've got an attorney general, he is a good man, and we might finally get to start seeing some real accountability for the Trump years.

 Whew .

OPEN THREAD!

[ Washington Post ]

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