Most of us will never meet an attorney general. We meet the law instead, at a traffic stop, in a probate office, across a counter at the county courthouse, and we assume without thinking about it that the rule being applied to us is the same rule that would be applied to anybody else standing where we stand. That assumption is the whole thing. It is what people mean when they say they live in a country of laws. The Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general at four in the morning on Saturday, and the fight that nearly sank him was about a document that lists particular people by name and treats them differently from everyone else. The Church has a great deal to say about that, and she has been saying it since long before there was a Department of Justice.

The News Story

The Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as United States attorney general in a 50-49 vote shortly after 4 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, August 8, installing President Donald Trump’s former personal defense lawyer as the nation’s top law enforcement officer and head of a Justice Department of more than 100,000 employees.^[1][2]

All Senate Democrats voted against the nomination, joined by Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was absent, leaving Blanche able to lose no more than two Republican votes. Decisive support came from Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who announced Friday he would vote yes; Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, also backed the nomination. The vote came at the end of a late-night session that ran into the early morning hours ahead of a scheduled Senate recess.^[3][4]

Blanche joined the second Trump administration as deputy attorney general and became acting attorney general in April after Trump removed Pam Bondi from the post. Trump announced in June that he had selected Blanche to lead the department permanently. Before entering government, Blanche represented Trump in the New York state prosecution over a $130,000 hush-money payment, which ended in conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, and in two federal cases brought by former special counsel Jack Smith, both of which ended when Trump won a second term.^[5][6]

The confirmation followed weeks of resistance centered on a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund the Justice Department created in May as part of a settlement resolving a $10 billion civil suit Trump had filed against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. The fund was intended to pay people who alleged the federal government had been weaponized against them. A second provision of the same settlement shielded Trump, family members and his businesses from tax audits and enforcement.^[7][8]

Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina held up the Judiciary Committee vote until they received written assurances. On August 2, Blanche issued an order stating that the directive establishing the fund “is rescinded and shall have no force or effect,” and the department issued a second statement narrowing the audit protections to apply only retroactively and to cover only Trump, his two oldest sons and the Trump Organization. Blanche advanced out of committee on a party-line vote the following Tuesday. Legal experts and Democrats have questioned whether the statements would hold up in court, noting they were not signed by all parties to the settlement.^[9][10]

Collins said she opposed Blanche over “several actions that have further eroded the Department’s independence.” Cassidy said he remained troubled by the department bringing suits against the president’s perceived political opponents, but said “the choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche. It is between Mr. Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the department effectively.” Cornyn said the department needed a permanent head. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., said Blanche “is continuing to act as if he’s still Donald Trump’s personal attorney.”^[11]

Blanche also drew criticism over the department’s release of Jeffrey Epstein investigative files that included unredacted names of survivors, and over a July meeting with survivors that several attendees called inadequate. Trump said this week that the anti-weaponization fund would have been “very fair.”^[12]

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

The Law Is Sovereign, Or Somebody Is

Start with the sentence that governs everything else here. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, quoting Saint John Paul II, puts it this way: “it is preferable that each power be balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds. This is the principle of the ‘rule of law’, in which the law is sovereign, and not the arbitrary will of individuals.”^[13]

Sit with that phrase for a second. The law is sovereign. Not the president, not the attorney general, not the Senate that confirmed him at four in the morning. The law. A country either operates that way or it operates the other way, and the Church says plainly which of the two she prefers and why. She prefers it because a law that is sovereign can protect a man who has no money and no lawyer, and a will that is sovereign can only protect whoever it happens to favor this week.

The Compendium is not describing an American arrangement or a modern innovation. It is describing something the Church worked out over centuries of watching kings, magistrates, and republics, and it grounds the whole thing in something deeper than procedure. Political authority, the Compendium says, “must always be exercised within the limits of morality and on behalf of the dynamically conceived common good, according to a juridical order enjoying legal status.”^[14] Authority operates inside law. It does not stand above the law and dispense it downward.

And when authority does step outside those limits, the Church does not soften the judgment. Authority derives its power to bind consciences from the moral order, “not from some arbitrary will or from the thirst for power.”^[15] That is the Compendium’s own language. Arbitrary will and thirst for power are named as the two counterfeits, the two things that can wear the costume of authority without possessing any of its substance.

A Document With Names In It

Now put the news beside the doctrine. The settlement at the center of the Blanche fight did two things. It set up a $1.8 billion fund to pay people who said the government had been weaponized against them. And it exempted a specific list of persons from tax audits and enforcement. After weeks of pressure from Senators Cornyn and Tillis, the department narrowed that second provision to cover, in its own words, the president, his two oldest sons, and the Trump Organization.

Consider what the narrowing actually accomplished. It made the carve-out smaller. It also made the carve-out precise. The list now contains three men and one company, by name.

The Church’s teaching on law has a technical vocabulary for this, and it is worth learning. A law is a rule for the common good, promulgated by one who has care of the community. That is the classical definition, and every word of it is doing work. For the common good. A rule that exists to advantage a named individual has failed the definition before anyone even asks whether it was properly enacted. The Compendium quotes Saint Thomas on the consequence: “Human law is law insofar as it corresponds to right reason and therefore is derived from the eternal law. When, however, a law is contrary to reason, it is called an unjust law; in such a case it ceases to be law and becomes instead an act of violence.”^[16]

That is a hard sentence and I want to be careful with it. Aquinas is not saying that every bad statute is literally a punch in the face. He is saying that a rule which abandons reason and the common good loses its claim on conscience, and that what remains is only force wearing the vestments of law. Applied here, the point is narrow and I think unavoidable. A tax code that applies to 340 million people, minus four named parties, has stopped being a rule and started being a favor. The favor may be legally defensible. It may survive every court challenge brought against it. It still fails the Church’s test of what a law is for.

The Catechism has a line about this that reads like it was written for the last three weeks. “Those in authority should practice distributive justice wisely, taking account of the needs and contribution of each, with a view to harmony and peace. They should take care that the regulations and measures they adopt are not a source of temptation by setting personal interest against that of the community.”^[17] A regulation that exempts the man who signs the regulations from the enforcement of the regulations exists to accomplish is exactly what that sentence forbids. The Catechism does not say such a measure is unwise or poorly timed. It says the men in charge should take care not to adopt it at all, because of what it does to them.

The Office Belongs To The People Who Will Never Enter It

Senator Padilla’s objection was that Blanche “is continuing to act as if he’s still Donald Trump’s personal attorney.” Set aside the politics of who said it. The observation reaches something the Church teaches with real precision, which is the difference between two kinds of duty that happen to be performed by the same profession.

A defense lawyer owes his client zeal. That is his whole vocation, and it is an honorable one; the Church insists that even the guilty have rights and that anyone accused deserves a real defense.^[18] The attorney general owes something else entirely. Pope Leo XIII, in the encyclical that shaped the Church’s modern social teaching, wrote that “the object of the government of the State should be, not the advantage of the ruler, but the benefit of those over whom he is placed.”^[19] The Catechism says the same thing in fewer words: “Those who exercise authority should do so as a service.”^[20] And the Compendium, describing the moral component of political representation, says responsible authority means power exercised by persons “who are able to accept the common good, and not prestige or the gaining of personal advantages, as the true goal of their work.”^[21]

The 100,000-plus people who work under Blanche now do not work for the president. They work for the United States. The attorney general holds that office the way a trustee holds property that belongs to somebody else. He may use it only for the beneficiary, and the beneficiary here is the public that mostly does not know his name and will never sit in his office.

This is why the Church is so insistent on the independence of the institutions that decide guilt. “In a State ruled by law,” the Compendium says, “the power to inflict punishment is correctly entrusted to the Courts,” and it goes on to note that modern constitutions “guarantee the judicial power the necessary independence in the realm of law.”^[22] The Church wants those functions insulated. She wants them insulated because she has seen what happens when the man who decides who gets prosecuted also has a personal stake in the answer.

Fairness requires putting the other case at its strongest, because a Catholic owes that much to people he disagrees with. Senator Cornyn made it on the floor before the committee vote, and it goes roughly like this. A department of 100,000 people cannot run indefinitely on an acting head; somebody has to own the decisions. A president is entitled to an attorney general he trusts, and trust of that kind is precisely what allows a subordinate to walk into the Oval Office and say no. Cassidy added the practical half: the realistic alternative to Blanche was another acting attorney general, possibly less competent and no more independent. Neither of those is a frivolous argument. Both take seriously something the Church also takes seriously, which is that government has to actually function and that governing well requires people who can speak candidly to the person in charge. The Compendium itself says elected officials must retain real freedom to fulfill their mandate rather than acting as passive agents of whoever is shouting loudest.^[23] A president picking someone he knows is not, by itself, a scandal.

The problem sits somewhere narrower. Trust running from the president down to the attorney general is ordinary. Duty running from the attorney general back up to the president, of the sort a defense lawyer owes his client, is the thing that cannot survive the transfer into public office. The Church draws that line at the point where the officeholder’s personal interest and his client’s interest start to look like the same interest, and a settlement that exempts his former client from audits is exactly where that line sits.

What A Prosecutor’s Office Is Actually For

There is a paragraph in the Compendium that ought to be printed and hung in every prosecutor’s office in the country. “The activity of offices charged with establishing criminal responsibility, which is always personal in character, must strive to be a meticulous search for truth and must be conducted in full respect for the dignity and rights of the human person; this means guaranteeing the rights of the guilty as well as those of the innocent.”^[24]

A search for truth. That is the job description. Not a search for the president’s enemies, and not a search for the president’s friends either. The same paragraph goes further, warning that officials of the court “are especially called to exercise due discretion in their investigations so as not to violate the rights of the accused to confidentiality and in order not to undermine the principle of the presumption of innocence.”^[24]

Two threads of the last several months run straight into that sentence. The first is the department’s record of charging people the president has publicly identified as adversaries, which is what troubled Senator Cassidy even as he voted yes. The second is the Epstein file release, in which survivors of sexual abuse had their names and personal information published by the department that was supposed to be vindicating them. Whatever mixture of haste and carelessness produced that, the Compendium’s rule about confidentiality was written precisely to prevent it, and the women who were harmed are among the least powerful people in the entire story.

I want to state the principle in a way that does not depend on whose administration is in office, because the Church’s teaching does not depend on that either. A Justice Department that prosecutes the president’s enemies is a scandal when the president is a Republican and a scandal when the president is a Democrat. If the reader’s instinct is to defend the practice when his own party holds the department, that instinct is the disease the teaching is meant to cure. The Compendium warns that political corruption “betrays at one and the same time both moral principles and the norms of social justice,” and that it “radically distorts the role of representative institutions, because they become an arena for political bartering between clients’ requests and governmental services.”^[25] Clients’ requests. A settlement negotiated between a president and the department that answers to him, producing a fund for his supporters and an audit exemption for his family, fits that description with uncomfortable exactness.

Who Actually Pays When The Law Bends

Here is where the Church’s social doctrine turns in a direction that political commentary almost never goes.

Leo XIII, writing in 1891 about workers who had no lawyers and nothing to bargain with, laid down a rule about how public authority should distribute its attention. “When there is question of defending the rights of individuals, the poor and badly off have a claim to especial consideration. The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon.”^[26]

Read that against the week’s news. The richer class has many ways of shielding themselves. A billion-dollar settlement with a written audit exemption is a way of shielding oneself. It is available to a very small number of Americans, and the number of Americans who can obtain one by negotiating with the agency that would otherwise audit them is smaller still. Meanwhile, the ordinary taxpayer in Omaha who gets a letter from the IRS has one available strategy: comply.

Pope Leo XIV made the same observation in Dilexi Te, his exhortation on love for the poor, and he made it about rights in general: “it frequently becomes clear that, in practice, human rights are not equal for all.”^[27] In practice. The Holy Father is pointing at the gap between what a legal system says on paper and what it delivers to a person with no money. Every exception carved into the law for a powerful party widens that gap, because the law’s protection is a common good and there is only so much of it. When enforcement bends around the top, it lands harder everywhere else, and the people it lands on are the ones the Church has told us to watch.

That is why this story belongs in a Catholic blog at all. The rule of law is not a lawyer’s hobby. It is the mechanism by which a poor man’s claim can defeat a rich man’s preference, and it is the only such mechanism a society has. The Compendium says the State “is the steward of the people’s resources, which it must administer with a view to the common good.”^[28] Impartial enforcement is one of those resources. Spending it on the people at the top means there is less of it for everybody underneath.

What Faithful Citizens Owe Now

The Church does not leave us with a complaint. She gives us a job.

The Catechism describes the duty of the citizen toward authority in terms that are neither cynical nor servile. Loyal collaboration with those in authority “includes the right, and at times the duty, to voice their just criticisms of that which seems harmful to the dignity of persons and to the good of the community.”^[29] Not grumbling. Not contempt. Just criticism, offered by people who actually want the community to be well governed. Senators Cornyn and Tillis did something like this when they held up a vote until they had a written rescission in hand, and Senators Collins and Murkowski did something like it when they voted no and said why. Whatever one thinks of their conclusions, the practice is the one the Catechism describes.

And the Compendium adds the structural half of the answer: “In the democratic system, political authority is accountable to the people. Representative bodies must be subjected to effective social control.”^[30] Effective. That word is doing work too. Accountability that exists only on paper is the same species of thing as a law that exempts four named parties.

Todd Blanche is the attorney general now. Catholics owe him the prayers we owe every person handed authority over other people’s lives, because that authority is a genuinely fearful thing to carry and the Church has never pretended otherwise. We also owe him, and the president who chose him, the honest expectation that he will treat the office as a trust. The measure will be simple enough to apply. Does the Justice Department under his leadership charge people because the evidence requires it or because the White House resents them? Does the tax code apply to the family at the top the way it applies to the family in the pew behind you?

The law is sovereign, or somebody is. A document with names in it has already told us which arrangement it prefers. The Church has spent two thousand years telling us why the other one is worth defending, and she is not going to stop this week.

---

Footnotes

1. “Senate Votes to Confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General,” NPR, August 8, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/08/08/g-s1-137631/senate-confirms-todd-blanche-attorney-general. ↩
2. Faris Tanyos, “The Senate Confirms Todd Blanche, Trump’s Former Defense Lawyer, as Attorney General,” CBS News, August 8, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/todd-blanche-senate-vote-confirm-trump/. ↩
3. “Todd Blanche Confirmed as Attorney General in Narrow Senate Vote After Tough Fight,” The Washington Post, August 8, 2026, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/08/senate-narrowly-approves-todd-blanche-ag-capping-tough-confirmation-fight/. ↩
4. “Senate Republicans Narrowly Confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General,” CNBC, August 8, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/08/senate-republicans-narrowly-confirm-todd-blanche-as-attorney-general.html. ↩
5. “Todd Blanche Confirmed as US Attorney General, Replacing Pam Bondi,” Fox News, August 8, 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/blanche-survives-republican-defectors-trump-gets-new-attorney-general. ↩
6. “Senate Votes to Confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General,” CNN Politics, August 8, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/08/politics/senate-todd-blanche-attorney-general. ↩
7. “Senate Confirms Todd Blanche as Attorney General After Weeks of Uncertainty,” NBC News, August 8, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/senate-confirms-todd-blanche-attorney-general-weeks-uncertainty-rcna591457. ↩
8. “Todd Blanche Narrowly Confirmed as Trump’s Attorney General in Overnight Vote,” PBS News, August 8, 2026, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/todd-blanche-narrowly-confirmed-as-trumps-attorney-general-in-overnight-vote. ↩
9. “Senate Confirms Todd Blanche as Attorney General After Bruising Fight,” The Hill, August 8, 2026, https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6017820-senate-todd-blanche-attorney-general-nomination/. ↩
10. “Todd Blanche Confirmed by Senate as Attorney General,” Roll Call, August 8, 2026, https://rollcall.com/2026/08/08/blanche-senate-confirmation-vote-attorney-general/. ↩
11. Sara Dorn, “Senate Confirms Todd Blanche as Attorney General,” Forbes, August 8, 2026, https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/08/08/senate-confirms-todd-blanche-as-attorney-general/. ↩
12. “Senate Confirms Todd Blanche After Handful of GOP Holdouts Threatened His Nomination,” The Daily Caller, August 8, 2026, https://dailycaller.com/2026/08/08/todd-blanche-confirmed-senate-attorney-general/. ↩
13. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 408, quoting John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1991), no. 44, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html. ↩
14. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 394. ↩
15. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 396. ↩
16. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 398, quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 3, ad 2. ↩
17. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2236, https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/section_two/chapter_two/article_4/v_the_authorities_in_civil_society.html. ↩
18. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 404. ↩
19. Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1891), no. 35, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html. ↩
20. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2235. ↩
21. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 410. ↩
22. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 402, quoting John Paul II, Address to the Italian Association of Magistrates. ↩
23. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 409. ↩
24. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 404. ↩
25. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 411. ↩
26. Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, no. 37. ↩
27. Pope Leo XIV, Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2025), no. 94, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20251004-dilexi-te.html. ↩
28. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 412. ↩
29. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2238. ↩
30. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 408. ↩