Congress

Pat Leahy has a warning for his former colleagues about Trump’s US attorney gambit

Published

11 months ago

July 30, 2025

Pat Leahy saw it coming.

In the throes of a 2007 scandal that seems quaint by modern standards, the then-Senate Judiciary chair issued a warning to all presidents: If you repeatedly sidestep the Senate to jam political loyalists into temporary U.S. attorney posts, you are violating the law. He was particularly concerned about “double dipping” — an effort by presidents to circumvent legal time limits on unconfirmed U.S. attorneys by creatively reshuffling personnel.

“It is not designed or intended to be used repeatedly for the same vacancy,” Leahy said at the time.

Fast forward to 2025: President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi are seeking to shatter that check on presidential power, finding new ways to carry out the “double dipping” that Leahy warned against:

In Washington, D.C., after Trump’s initial pick Ed Martin failed to win Senate confirmation, Trump simply appointed a second interim prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, to a successive 120-day slot.
In northern New York and Los Angeles, Bondi maneuvered to put Trump’s expiring U.S. attorney picks into “acting” roles that would give them another 210 days on the job without Senate confirmation.
And in New Jersey, the Justice Department went nuclear after district court judges appointed a career prosecutor to replace Trump’s favored pick, Alina Habba, as temporary U.S. attorney — a power the courts have had since the Civil War. An aggressive effort to keep Habba in place has already disrupted a handful of criminal cases in New Jersey.

With a largely compliant, Republican-led Congress, Trump has faced minimal pushback. But the campaign presages battles to come, particularly in blue states where Democratic senators still wield significant sway over who can be confirmed as permanent U.S. attorneys.
It’s the latest expression of Trump’s effort to shrug off traditional constraints on presidential power and relegate Congress to bystander or cheerleader. And it was a concern that animated Congress’ decision to pass the 2007 law checking the president’s power to unilaterally install U.S. attorneys in the first place.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the moves by Trump and Bondi to reshuffle U.S. attorneys are rooted in a pair of federal laws creating “separate mechanisms” to appoint different types of temporary office-holders. Those statutes, however, don’t speak to whether presidents and attorneys general can deploy those mechanisms in back-to-back succession.

Blue Light News caught up with Leahy, who’s living a peaceful retirement in Vermont, and asked about recent developments in the U.S. attorney saga. His main message: The Senate needs to stand up for itself and its power of “advice and consent” for all officers of the federal government.

“No senator should have to go back home and have people say why the heck did you let this person come in as a U.S. attorney,” the former Democratic senator said. “Republicans and Democrats agreed with me on that, that we had to have some say in the matter. We can’t tell the president who to appoint. But we can certainly tell them who not to appoint for our states.”

Habba’s case, in particular, may test whether that longstanding history can outweigh the gravitational force of a president intent on rejecting it.

“The Senate seems to have forgotten that it’s an independent body,” Leahy lamented, “and if it fails to act that way, the Senate suffers but the country suffers.”

Congress

GOP leaders cancel Friday votes as House agenda hangs in balance

Published

2 hours ago

June 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Republican leaders have canceled planned Friday votes as GOP hard-liners continue threatening to block legislative action over an elections bill that is stalled in the Senate, according to a notice sent to members Thursday.

Members are expected to leave town after a 1 p.m. vote Thursday, and it’s possible they might not return Monday as planned: Speaker Mike Johnson is hoping to discuss the legislative agenda with President Donald Trump at an afternoon meeting in hopes of brokering a solution that will allow the House to resume voting next week.

If not, the House could join the Senate on an extended recess, not returning till mid-July, two people granted anonymity to describe internal conversations said.

Congress

Raskin launches discharge effort to formally block ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’

Published

3 hours ago

June 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is launching a campaign to force a floor vote on legislation that would formally block the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

The so-called No Carte Blanche Act — a tongue-in-cheek nod to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — also would also explicitly bar payouts from the Judgement Fund, a pre-existing account for settlements with the United States, to people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

While Blanche, who will sit for a confirmation hearing July 15 to run the Justice Department in a more permanent capacity, recently told lawmakers that the administration was abandoning the effort amid bipartisan backlash, he has refused to put that pledge in a written declaration to Congress.

“This is why Congress must act to comprehensively shut down this shameful shakedown once and for all,” Raskin, of Maryland, said in a statement. “The people’s representatives must decide whether to uphold the rule of law and protect taxpayer dollars—or stand aside as this unprecedented corruption spins out of control.”

Raskin is attempting to compel a floor vote on his bill through a discharge petition, where 218 signatures in support will require Speaker Mike Johnson to bring the measure up for a vote. It’s a maneuver members of both parties have deployed with success in recent months due to the GOP’s slim majority — and it’s possible it could work this time, too, with a small number of House Republicans on record opposing the fund.

It would likely face an uphill battle getting the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to become law, however: An earlier attempt from Democrats to block the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” from going into effect failed in a 50-49 vote.

The fund was created out of a settlement from President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the federal government over the leak of his tax returns. While it was purportedly intended to provide financial compensation to individuals deemed victims of “lawfare,” critics worried it was designed to reward Trump’s allies.

Also as part of the settlement agreement, Trump, his family and businesses would be freed from any current audits of their taxes. Raskin’s legislation would also block that provision.

Congress

Capitol agenda: Johnson tries to clean up Trump’s Hill mess

Published

6 hours ago

June 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump’s obsession with the SAVE America Act has hurled Congress into indefinite gridlock.

Senators are gone until July 13 after starting their Independence Day recess a few days early.

Now House Republican lawmakers are looking toward Speaker Mike Johnson, who will Thursday head to the White House to try to convince the president to salvage the GOP’s legislative agenda.

The president’s insistence Congress pass the controversial election security legislation has ground both chambers to a halt.

The deadlock threatens to derail a host of other legislative efforts Republicans and the White House hoped to complete in the coming weeks, including a sweeping reconciliation bill filled with potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in Iran war military funding, billions of dollars in relief for farmers, fiscal 2027 funding bills and the annual defense policy bill.

“I’d like to celebrate victories, not come up with reasons why we failed,” Sen. Kevin Cramer said in an interview, joining other Republicans in venting frustration after Trump scrapped a planned signing of a major housing affordability bill Wednesday.

“We’ve demonstrated a lot of dysfunction lately,” he said.

Wednesday’s explosive lunch with Trump and GOP senators probably didn’t help.

“The president came to the Capitol to do what he thinks Senate Republican leadership can’t do: flip votes on SAVE and nuking the filibuster,” a senior Senate GOP aide told Jordain.

“He left with the same number of votes that existed when he arrived — possibly fewer.”

Now eyes are on Johnson, who has lost control of the floor as hard-liners demand the Senate pass the elections overhaul.

He’s keeping the House in session ahead of his 2 p.m. Trump meeting in hopes of salvaging plans to put several bills on the floor this week — including a pair of fiscal 2027 spending measures.

But if Johnson and Trump can’t reach a compromise, GOP leadership may cancel all votes for the remainder of the week and next week, too.

That would further imperil their plans for another party-line reconciliation bill and the $88 billion supplement funding request the White House transmitted Wednesday.

What else we’re watching:

— JOHNSON’S PITCH FOR RECON 3.0 FALLS SHORT: House GOP leaders are trying to make good on their promise to advance a long-shot, party-line package of conservative priorities by arguing it’s the only chance to pass pieces of Trump’s doomed elections bill. So far, their pitch is falling short. Members who attended a meeting with House Budget Republicans Wednesday argued the REAL ID grant program Johnson proposed was no substitute for enacting the full SAVE America Act. And fiscal hawks on the panel warned they would oppose any budget resolution unless it’s paid for on a yearly basis, and without budgeting gimmicks.

— TRUMP’S $88B ASK FOR IRAN WAR, FARM AID: The White House sent Congress Wednesday a much-awaited request for emergency funding to cover military operations in Iran, farm assistance and disaster assistance. But the proposal could complicate House Republicans’ pursuit of a third party-line spending package, which was supposed to be centered around $350 billion in defense funding that Democrats wouldn’t support. The request for tens of billions of dollars in extra war spending comes as the House Appropriations panel Wednesday advanced a $1.1 trillion base budget plan for the Pentagon. Taken together, the three efforts represent a record-breaking roughly $1.5 trillion military budget, about a 50 percent hike from this year’s level.

Jordain Carney, Mia McCarthy, Meredith Lee Hill, Connor O’Brien and Grace Yarrow contributed to this report.