Tillis, Cornyn, and The Epstein Vote

A Call To Courage

The victims of Jeffrey Epstein have released a letter to the U.S. Senators who will cast the deciding votes on Todd Blanche’s nomination to serve as Donald Trump’s Attorney General.

I have excoriated Todd Blanche as unethical and downright evil for his leadership of the Trump-Epstein cover-up, and I stand by every word. But the letter these women have written is so painful, so passionate, and so morally unanswerable that I am compelled to share it with you in full.

Thom Tillis and John Cornyn will be under massive political and personal pressure to vote for Blanche. The facile, fashionable argument is already circulating: “Well, if we don’t confirm Blanche, we’ll just get someone worse.”

That argument doesn’t even begin to meet the test. It is the reflexive whimper of men who have already decided to fold and want a reason that sounds at least adjacent to principle. This is fundamentally a vote more about Jeffrey Epstein than Todd Blanche.

Tillis and Cornyn have a moment in front of them that will define their legacies more than their legislative careers ever could. No one will remember their votes in the chamber. No one will remember their floor speeches, the committees they chaired, or the issues they championed. History does not preserve the small ball players, the little men with little souls.

It remembers the hour a man was handed a clear choice between the powerful and the abused, and it remembers which side he chose.

Both men have already lost their seats at the whim of the very man Blanche has sworn to protect. Protect Trump over the truth. Over the good. Over the just.

They owe that man nothing. The party they climbed for decades is gone. It is dead, captured and killed by forces they could neither understand nor accommodate, and it has no right to demand their loyalty now. Nothing it can offer them is a promise worth believing. No threat it can make against them is anything more than an absurdity.

They are free. They just have to find the nerve to vote like it.

So it comes down to the only thing that will outlast them: the legacy they choose in the next few minutes on that floor.

Their families will not remember the press releases. They will remember this vote. They will remember whether these men stood with the victims of sexual exploitation and abuse, or with the men who committed it and the men who, like Blanche, buried it.

Their wives will remember. Their daughters will remember. Their granddaughters will remember. And each of those women will one day understand exactly what these two men were asked to do, and exactly what they did.

A vote for Todd Blanche is a vote to look away from the suffering that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell inflicted. It is a vote to declare that the girls who cried in the dark, lost and terrified in the hands of monsters most of us cannot bear to imagine, meant nothing then and mean nothing now.

It is a vote for a man whose entire purpose is to shield the most powerful men in the world from justice. It is a message sent to every girl and every woman in this country: no one is coming for you, and no one will protect you from them.

A vote for Todd Blanche is an endorsement of a massive, illegal government conspiracy to protect Jeffrey Epstein and the powerful men and women who joined him in the rape, trafficking, and exploitation of young girls.

Blanche told us who he was from the very start. His moral and ethical framework fails the most rudimentary test a decent person passes without thinking. That alone makes him unqualified to serve as Attorney General of the United States.

But he is disqualified by something worse: his cavalier, sneering, repugnant treatment of Epstein’s victims. He is a vicious man who wanted nothing more than to race out of that room and report back to Donald Trump that he had put the victims in their place. Not one iota of their pain and misery moved his soul.

Tillis and Cornyn can still be something better than that.

They can be heroes. It would take exactly the courage that every survivor of Jeffrey Epstein already found when she stood up, said her name, and made public the worst thing that was ever done to her.

Those women showed us what strength looks like. Now we find out whether Thom Tillis and John Cornyn have any of their own.

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Make it impossible for these two men to pretend they didn’t know.