U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) delivered the remarks below on the U.S. Senate Floor on July 27, noting why he is withholding any nominations for the Department of Justice put forth by the the administration of President Joe Biden:
[The Biden administration] is not sending its best to the Department of Justice.
Many of the nominees are unqualified. Some of them seem actively corrupt and some, I assume, are good people. But the problem is not this specific nominee.
The problem is the fact that the Department of Justice has been corrupted under the Biden administration, and there needs to be some reckoning with the American people and with this body and with the nominations process before we allow these nominees to glide path to the confirmation process.
Let's just talk about a tale of two leaders in this country right now, one a Democrat and one a Republican, of course, the president of the United States. His son, Hunter Biden, has a multiple federal charges, multiple federal investigations that implicate directly on the president's business dealings may very well implicate the president directly and plausibly could lead to some significant problems for the president in the presidential election.
Yesterday, the plea deal that the Department of Justice cut with Hunter Biden fell apart under minimal scrutiny from the federal judge in that case. That is how the Department of Justice treats the Democratic leadership in this country with kid gloves, even in the face of very serious corruption.
Now, let's ask ourselves how they treat the former Republican president in the face of a classified document scandal, where literally the claim is that the president of the United States, mishandled the documents of his own administration.
Now, nobody doubts that President Trump had the right to declassify the documents at issue in this case. The argument is that he didn't and therefore they want to throw him in jail.
Is that really what we're doing at the height of a presidential campaign is trying to throw the former president in jail – the likely leader of the opposition in prison because he didn't cross the T's and dot the I's on the classification or declassification process.
This is a ridiculous scandal in our entire country. And look, whether these nominees are qualified or not qualified, we should have the vote and make that determination as a body. It's not at the end of the day, as I've learned in eight months, all that difficult and all that hard to vote.
But we have to stop giving these nominees the glide path until Merrick Garland commits to using the Department of Justice for Justice and not for politics as it's being used today. So, Mr. President, I object.
U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) is the junior senator from Ohio. He is the author of "Hillbilly Elegy."
