“It is your business to act well the part that is given you; but to select the part belongs to another.” — Epictetus, Enchiridion, XVII
Early this morning, the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as Attorney General of the United States, 50 to 49. Every Democrat voted no. So did two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. (NPR)
Blanche spent most of his career on the advocate’s side of a courtroom: a decade as a federal prosecutor in New York’s violent crimes unit, then years defending white-collar clients in private practice. In 2023 he took on a single, high-profile assignment: representing Donald Trump personally, in the hush money trial, the classified documents case, and the election obstruction case. (Wikipedia) That’s not a dishonorable job on its own. The system depends on lawyers willing to argue a client’s case as hard as it can honestly be argued, whether the client is popular or not, guilty or not.
Cicero, in On Duties, wrote about exactly this kind of career turn: the difference between the obligations of an advocate and the obligations of a judge. An advocate’s job, as he framed it, is to represent one side as persuasively as honesty allows. A judge’s job is the opposite: to represent no side at all, including, especially, the side that appointed him. Same person, two entirely different duties, and everything depends on knowing which one the role in front of you actually requires.
In March 2025 the Senate confirmed Blanche as Deputy Attorney General, 52 to 46. Thirteen months later, Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi over the backlash surrounding the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and Blanche moved up to acting AG. (CNBC) By the time the Senate voted this week, it wasn’t guessing about which duty he’d carried forward. The record was already in front of it, largely thanks to its own members’ oversight work. Six Senate Democrats wrote to Blanche in January that he held well over $150,000 in bitcoin and other crypto assets while his Justice Department disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and halted a set of Biden-era crypto investigations, without recusing. “At the very least, you had a glaring conflict of interest and should have recused yourself,” they wrote. (Salon) In May, his department settled a $10 billion lawsuit Trump, his two elder sons, and the Trump Organization had filed over a leaked-tax-return case, in a deal that shielded all three from IRS audits on returns filed before that date, a protection ordinary taxpayers don’t get. (Time) And this week’s confirmation nearly stalled entirely until Blanche rescinded a separate, contested $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund just to win over holdout senators. (NPR)
That’s the part of this story I don’t think gets enough weight: not just what Blanche did, but what the Senate did with what it already knew. The Judiciary Committee had advanced his nomination on a strict 12-10 party line, every Republican for, every Democrat against, before it ever reached the floor. Collins, explaining her no vote, said the department had grown “increasingly political” and that Blanche’s tenure had “further eroded the department’s independence.” Murkowski said the country needs an Attorney General who will “check the worst impulses of this administration,” and that she didn’t have confidence Blanche would be that person. (Axios) Two senators found the documented record disqualifying. Forty-eight of their colleagues, holding the identical record, voted the other way anyway. Advice and consent is supposed to be the Senate’s own persona shift: from political ally to independent check, the moment a nomination reaches the floor. On this vote, for all but two members, it wasn’t.
Epictetus never promises you get to choose your part. Most of us don’t. What he insists on is that once you’re standing in a new role, you play that role and not the last one, even when the two require opposite instincts. An advocate’s whole training is loyalty to a client. A magistrate’s whole training is loyalty to everyone equally, which sometimes means the client least of all. The Senate’s whole institutional purpose, in a confirmation vote, is to check that shift actually happened before handing over the office. A near-party-line vote, on a record this specific, isn’t evidence the check occurred. It’s evidence the chamber skipped it.
Almost none of us will run the Justice Department or sit on a confirmation vote, but nearly all of us know this exact collision from smaller rooms: the parent who spent years as one child’s fiercest defender, handed the job of refereeing fairly between two kids that same afternoon. The hiring committee that already knows the leading candidate personally, and waves through red flags a stranger would have been screened out over. The sibling named executor, dividing an estate the same way among people they don’t love equally. Different role, different duty, same person standing in the room. Most of us fumble it at first, not from dishonesty, but because the old role’s habits are strong and the new role’s real obligations haven’t been learned yet, or, worse, have been learned and set aside anyway.
The Practice
Think of one role you occupy now that used to belong to someone else, or that grew out of a different role you used to play: a promotion, a new position in the family, a committee seat, a friendship that turned into a responsibility. Name, specifically, what the new role actually owes the people in it, apart from what your old loyalties want to do. Then, once this week, act on that obligation deliberately, even when the old instinct, or the easier vote, pulls the other way.
See you next Saturday. — Phil
Sourced from NPR’s coverage of the August 8, 2026 Senate confirmation vote and the anti-weaponization fund rescission, CNBC’s reporting on Pam Bondi’s April 2026 dismissal, Salon’s reporting on the Senate Democrats’ letter regarding Blanche’s crypto holdings, Time’s reporting on the IRS audit immunity settlement, Axios’s reporting on Collins’s and Murkowski’s opposition, and Wikipedia’s biographical timeline for Todd Blanche.