Senate confirms Merrick Garland as attorney general five years after being snubbed for Supreme Court

Five years ago, his nomination to be a Supreme Court justice languished in the face of Republican opposition

The Senate voted on Wednesday to confirm Merrick Garland as Joe Biden’s pick for attorney general, almost five years to the day after president Barack Obama unsuccessfully nominated the former appeals judge to be a Supreme Court justice.

Mr Obama nominated Mr Garland to replace the late conservative Antonin Scalia on the high court in March of 2016, but Republicans refused to hold any hearings on his candidacy before that year’s presidential election in the fall, effectively handing the next Supreme Court pick to Donald Trump.

“America can breathe a sigh of relief that we’re finally going to have someone like Merrick Garland leading the Justice Department. Someone with integrity, independence, respect for the rule of law and credibility on both sides of the aisle,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said on the Senate floor. “He understands that the job of the attorney general is one to protect rule of law, unlike the previous attorneys general under President Trump.”

Mr Garland, a former judge on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, was confirmed with 70 votes in the Senate, and received wide bipartisan support.

“Judge Garland is a good pick to lead the Department of Justice. I don’t think anyone doubts his credentials,” Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a Republican, said in a statement on Monday. “He has decades of experience as one of the most respected appellate judges in the country. And before that, he was a great prosecutor.”

The former appeals judge, who also previously served in president Bill Clinton’s Justice Department, will take office at a particularly delicate moment for the DOJ. He said his first priority will be prosecuting those involved in the Capitol riots, and warned that US is facing an even greater threat of domestic terrorism than it did during Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing in the 1990s, which Mr Garland helped prosecute.

“It looks like an extremely aggressive and perfectly appropriate beginning to an investigation, all across the country in the same way our original Oklahoma City investigation was. Many times more,” Mr Garland said during his confirmation hearings of the ongoing prosecution effort, which has already netted hundreds of charges. “I certainly agree that we are facing a more dangerous period than we faced in Oklahoma City at the end at that time.”

“We begin with the people on the ground and we work our way up to those who are involved and further involved and we will pursue these leads, wherever they take us,” he added.

Another major area of focus will be civil rights and policing. The DOJ is investigating the death of George Floyd for potential civil rights charges, an investigation that languished under the Trump administration.

Under the Trump administration, the ostensibly neutral DOJ frequently was at the center of partisan political battles involving the president. Mr Trump would clout conflict of interest norms and regularly weigh in on DOJ prosecutions against his former campaign associates.

Last March, a federal judge criticised Trump administration attorney general William Barr for his “distorted and misleading” public summaries of the Mueller report. Also in 2020, the DOJ sought to intervene on the president’s behalf in a suit from author E Jean Carroll relating to her rape accusations against Mr Trump, which he denies.

Mr Garland will also inherit a DOJ that ceased to defend landmark pieces of federal legislation like the Affordable Care Act, which is currently facing a Supreme Court challenge by a number of red states.

Vanita Gupta, another Biden nominee to the DOJ, has faced a tougher road in the Senate, where some Republicans have accused her of being overly partisan to take on the potential post of associate attorney general, number three at the agency.