Freshman Republican Senator J.D. Vance is blocking the nominations for two critical U.S. Attorney positions because the Justice Department is prosecuting Donald Trump.
When Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois complained that Vance’s blockade of these two critical vacancies was “unprecedented,” Vance agreed, saying in times past “when these nominations sailed through unanimous consent, the Department of Justice wasn’t trying to throw the political rival of the President of the United States in prison.”
Vance claimed he is “objecting to this because we live in a banana republic.”
This is not the first time (nor shall it be the last) that Republicans invoke that phrase which refers to politically unstable countries characterized in part by abuse of power.
That incendiary claim rings hollow, however, when Trump—leader of Vance’s party and the target of the aforementioned prosecutions—famously called for the prosecution and incarceration of his own political enemies: as candidate against Hillary Clinton in 2016, as President against Joe Biden in 2020, and as candidate against Biden, Barack Obama, and other Democrats in 2023.
As Trump’s own former attorney general, William Barr, has repeatedly stressed: Trump will eagerly seek to weaponize the Justice Department if he’s given a second term.
Moreover, as Durbin reminded Vance in their Senate exchange, Vance’s blockade will not allow a federal prosecutor to investigate the 14 average daily drug deaths in his own home state: “How can you explain to the people of Ohio and Illinois that you’re trying to make it even on political grounds at their expense?”
The message is clear: the party of “law and order” refuses to live under either. And if you try to apply the law to them, they’ll work aggressively to undercut it everywhere, even at the expense of their constituents.