The loneliness of Merrick Garland

Merrick Garland is not a popular man. The attorney general has been disliked on the right ever since he issued a memo last year villainizing parents protesting school board meetings. But he now faces growing criticism from the left for what many Democrats consider an overly ponderous approach to January 6 prosecutions.

Having spent the Trump years lamenting a loss of norms and claiming to want positions of power to be filled with sober, responsible characters, Democrats are growing impatient with an attorney general who follows exactly that approach. Why, they ask, hasn’t there been more butt-kicking and name-taking with regard to the riot at the Capitol? And, in particular, why isn’t Trump feeling the heat?

Among the “lock him up” crowd? President Biden. This weekend the New York Times reported that “as recently as late last year, Mr. Biden confided to his inner circle that he believed former president Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments. And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.”

Leaving to one side the amusing insistence that Biden has kept his reservations about Garland private when comments to his “inner circle” have somehow made it into the New York Times, Biden should be careful what he wishes for. There’s another high-profile federal investigation underway at the DoJ, into the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and his tax arrangements and overseas business dealings.

But the public pressure from Team Biden isn’t for a more fiery prosecutor but for a more partisan one. Garland reportedly likes to repeat a mantra: “The rule of law means that there not be one rule for friends and another for foes.” Washington Post columnist and unstintingly loyal Bidenista Jennifer Rubin summarizes the rebuttal to that stolid approach when she laments that in Garland Biden “selected someone totally lacking not only in partisanship but in political awareness and savviness.” Rubin’s solution? Fire Garland! (Here, of course, it’s worth considering what might have happened — indeed what did happen — when Trump did something similar.)

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Biden’s frustration with Garland seems to have grown as his political fortunes have nosedived. But if he thinks an enthusiastic prosecution of his 2020 opponent and the 2024 GOP front-runner is what his presidency needs, he could be in for a rude awakening.

Democrats falling into the trap of obsessing over Trump at a time when Americans are frustrated at rising prices and concerned about disorder overseas is unlikely to reflect well on them. Just look at what happened in Virginia with Terry McAuliffe and his Trump-heavy gubernatorial bid. There’s no reason to think that a midterm slate of elections dominated by a legal showdown between the Biden administration and Trump would be any less disastrous.

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Fired for a harmless joke

Yesterday my Spectator colleague Amber Athey told the maddening story of how a harmless joke about Kamala Harris’s choice of outfit for the State of the Union led to absurd claims of racism and cost her a gig at WMAL, where, until recently she was a co-host on the morning drive program O’Connor & Company. Amber explains the outrageous full story here.

She says of The Spectator: “I’ve been lucky enough to work for… a magazine that understands and fights against censorship, for the past two years. They laughed at and promptly deleted the angry emails about my Kamala tweet.”

Nice day for a… White House wedding

Naomi Biden, the president’s twenty-eight-year-old granddaughter and Hunter Biden’s oldest daughter, will have her wedding reception at the White House. When Naomi celebrates tying the knot with her twenty-four-year-old fiancé Peter Neal, it will be the first family wedding celebration hosted at the White House since a party to celebrate Jenna Bush’s wedding to Henry Hager in 2008.

A very DC hiring

The news that Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski will be voting to confirm Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson is the latest step in what has proved to be a relatively straightforward process for a White House hungry for a political win. Jackson is set to earn at least fifty-three votes and is well on her way to accession to the court. When that process is complete, it will be mission accomplished for Doug Jones, the former Democratic senator from Alabama drafted by the White House to act as sherpa for the KBJ nomination process.

This morning, Politico reports out an amusing, if ultimately inconsequential, backstory to Jones landing that job. According to Marianne Levine and Burgess Everett, the day after news of Stephen Breyer’s announcement broke, Jones received an email from a reporter asking whether the White House had asked him to help get Biden’s nominee confirmed. Jones admitted that the thought hadn’t really crossed his mind but forwarded the email to the West Wing. “If you’re interested, we’re interested,” came the response via telephone. As Politico puts it, a “quintessentially Washington” way to get hired.