President Joe Biden made a consequential and significant mistake when he appointed Merrick Garland to be Attorney General of the United States. Garland has turned out to be weak, clueless, and ineffective, to the point that his actions are currently endangering our very democracy.
At first Biden's appointment of Garland seemed sensible. Most of us remember when Senate Leader Mitch McConnell blocked President Obama's plans to put the moderate jurist on the Supreme Court, the seat eventually going to right-wing religious fanatic Amy Comey Barrett.
When Biden took office in 2021, he likely figured Merrick Garland would be acceptable to both parties, and would be objective, serious about the law, and could be counted on to do the right thing.
Merrick Garland turned out to be a major disappointment in so many ways. President Biden, reportedly, and most Democrats now are not happy with the A.G.'s decisions, and most people deem it unlikely he will return to head the Justice Department if Biden wins a second term.
But so much damage by Garland's inept performance as Attorney General has already been done. The worst was his foot-dragging in holding Donald Trump accountable for his many crimes and abuses of power while president.
By the time Garland appointed special prosecutor Jack Smith in November of 2021 to look into Trump's transgressions,, almost two years after the January 6 insurrection, too much time was wasted. And everyone knows Trump is a master at delaying justice and avoiding accountability.
Trump has a full docket of court cases from now to the election, and 91 felony counts to attend to. But if he can appeal, distract, and delay his accountability for his numerous crimes, he could conceivably win the presidential election, and make all the legal charges against him and his cronies disappear. Were he to win the presidency, this country would quickly transform from a democracy (albeit imperfect) to a fascist-style autocracy that would be virtually impossible to overcome.
Some Biden aides say that in his decisions to select Trump-appointed prosecutors as special counsels in both the classified documents investigation and the probe into Hunter Biden, Garland 's attempts to go out of his way to not appear biased often led to over-correcting toward Trump-friendly prosecutors.
When Biden announced he would be nominating Garland as Attorney General at the beginning of his term, he told him "Your loyalty is not to me. You won't work for me. You are not the president or the vice president's lawyer." Democrats close to Biden fear Garland has become too consumed by that instruction to appear impartial.
"I had refused to criticize [Garland] but appointing Hur, who is obviously a Republican tool and who issued what I think is an irresponsible report which violates DOJ standards, was a mistake," Democratic consultant Robert Shrum said. "I think Garland will be criticized by historians."
Garland's selection of Robert Hur, a Republican-leaning, Trump-appointed federal prosecutor, to look into President Biden's mishandling of official documents was a major mistake. Hur glossed over the potential crime and zeroed in on Biden's mental state, which was beyond the scope of his duties, and changed the narrative of the election to whether Biden is capable of performing his presidential duties. That he has performed his job so far quite capably has taken a back seat to concerns about his age.
"Garland is far and away Biden's worst appointee by an order of magnitude," Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the liberal American Prospect. "And we all pay the price. If Biden goes down the drain because Garland has mishandled the investigation of Trump and gave Republicans a weapon " then the country pays the price. It's not just that Biden gets punished for the stupidity of appointing Garland."
Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University, wrote this on X: "I've long respected my friend and former student Merrick Garland, but he has bent too far backwards in order to avoid seeming pro-Biden."
President Biden made a regretable blunder appointing Garland as the United States Attorney General. He needs to find a way to correct his poor judgement before further damage results from it.
