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Merrick Garland, President Joe Biden's attorney general nominee, vowed Monday to keep politics out of the Justice Department and to fully prosecute the "heinous" crimes committed in the attack on the US Capitol in the deadly riot on January 6.

Garland was praised by Republicans and Democrats alike in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday, where he faced questions about the politically charged investigations that await him if confirmed to lead the Justice Department

he strongly rebuked the Trump administration's child separation immigration policy, calling it "shameful" and committing to aiding a Senate investigation into the matter.

he Senate voted to confirm attorney general nominee Merrick Garland on Wednesday, sending the appellate judge on his mission to uphold the integrity of the Justice Department after its actions over the past years threatened to undermine it.

Garland was confirmed in a 70-30 vote.

"America can breathe a sigh of relief that we are finally going to have someone like Merrick Garland leading the Justice Department," said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York. He called Garland "someone with integrity, independence, respect for the rule of law and credibility on both sides of the aisle."

Merrick Garland faces multiple crises to address and politically tough decisions to make as he belatedly takes the reins at the Justice Department as attorney general.

He'll try to heal a workforce that was battered during the Trump era, deliver on President Joe Biden's liberal priorities and campaign promises and oversee some of the most complex investigations in a generation.

Garland got a bipartisan nod of approval of 70-30, earning the support of 20 Republicans in a Senate where zero-sum partisanship is the new normal. But that was the easy part for Garland, who's been a federal appellate judge since 1997.

“The only way we can succeed and retain the trust of the American people is to adhere to the norms that have become part of the DNA of every Justice Department employee,” Mr. Garland said.

Mr. Garland was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday in a bipartisan vote, with 20 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in supporting his nomination.

But he is best known for Republicans’ refusal to consider his nomination in 2016 to serve on the Supreme Court, a political power play that ultimately allowed Mr. Trump to fill the seat.

udge Garland, who led the Justice Department’s prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombing, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on the first day of his confirmation hearings that the early stages of the current inquiry into the “white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol” seemed to be aggressive and “perfectly appropriate.”

“Communities of color and other minorities still face discrimination in housing, education, employment and the criminal justice system,” Judge Garland said in his opening statement. But he said he did not support the call from some on the left that grew out of this summer’s civil rights protests to defund the police.

In addition to an immediate briefing on the investigation, he said he would “give the career prosecutors who are working on this manner 24/7 all the resources they could possibly require.”Battling extremism is “central” to the Justice Department’s mission, and has often overlapped with its mission to combat systemic racism, as with its fight against the Ku Klux Klan, Judge Garland said.

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted to confirm Merrick B. Garland on Wednesday to serve as attorney general, giving the former prosecutor and widely respected federal judge the task of leading the Justice Department at a time when the nation faces domestic extremist threats and a reckoning over civil rights.

“Attorney General Garland will lead the Department of Justice with honesty and integrity,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “He has a big job ahead of him, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have in his place.”

Judge Garland has amassed decades of credentials in the law. He clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr., worked for years as a federal prosecutor and led major investigations into the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and others before being confirmed to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1997.

The Senate voted to confirm Merrick B. Garland on Wednesday to serve as attorney general, giving the former prosecutor and widely respected federal judge the task of leading the Justice Department at a time when the nation faces domestic extremist threats and a reckoning over civil rights.

Judge Garland was confirmed 70 to 30, with 20 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in supporting him

At his confirmation hearing, Judge Garland, 68, said that becoming attorney general would “be the culmination of a career I have dedicated to ensuring that the laws of our country are fairly and faithfully enforced and the rights of all Americans are protected.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland is quickly negating the Trump administration’s law enforcement legacy, dismaying conservatives with a burst of aggressive reversals and new policies.

Liberal fears that the soft-spoken Garland might resist prosecuting Trump and his allies for the sake of unity were partially eased on Wednesday, when news broke that federal agents had raided the Manhattan home of Rudy Giuliani.

"Pattern or practice" investigations into the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments, following the deaths last year of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Judge Merrick B. Garland said on Monday that the United States faces “a more dangerous period” from domestic extremists than it faced at the time of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and praised the early stages of the investigation into the “white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol” on Jan. 6 as appropriately aggressive.

“I do not plan to be interfered with by anyone,” Judge Garland said. Should he be confirmed, he said he would uphold the principle that “the attorney general represents the public interest.”

Judge Garland said he also was not aware of the details of a preliminary Justice Department investigation into how Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration handled New York nursing homes during the pandemic.

the thrust of each side’s interrogation made clear the partisan split over what it means to put justice into practice

For most of the Republicans on the committee, justice seemed wholly defined as punishment: why certain people deserve it, how harsh it can be, why it shouldn’t be even harsher and whether Hunter Biden will get his fair share of it.

They are champions of law and order, especially when it comes to making sure that left-wing antagonists, such as those who attacked the federal courthouse in Portland last year or who brought down Confederate monuments, are punished

oe Biden’s big virus relief plan is about to become law. And the Senate has confirmed Merrick Garland as attorney general.“The president and his team must be thrilled that Senate Republicans are proving to be more fair and more principled on personnel matters than the Democratic minority’s behavior just four years ago,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just before the Garland vote.

“It’s way too easy,” says Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who’s been a long-running opponent of the filibuster as it stands today. His solution, which makes perfect sense, is that anybody who wants to stall the Senate by staging a filibuster should actually have to keep talking.

The Democrats have been waiting a long while to get through an agenda more exciting than not-going-bankrupt. One after another, Fallon predicted, legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will make it through the House and then turn the Senate into a kind of “Kabuki theater,” where, thanks to the filibuster, “they bring up one bill after another and have them fail.”Finally, Democrats will be so exhausted they’ll demand some action. “If they can summon their nerve to do it before August recess. …” he mused hopefully.

While there haven't been any federal or state executions since Biden took office, about 2,500 men and women sit on death row in federal and state prisons across the country -- and advocates say that, in the absence of an executive order from the White House, a state can at any moment schedule executions or the Justice Department can decide to calendar a federal inmate's death date.

a promise to pass legislation eliminating the death penalty on the federal level and to "incentivize states to follow the federal government's example. These individuals should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole."

The President has not directly addressed the death penalty since taking office -- though White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in March that Biden continues to have "grave concerns" about the practice.

Joe Biden promised, if elected, to create a bipartisan commission to study court reform proposals

But who would sit on the commission? And would it have any teeth?

With Democrats now in control, some liberals are clamoring for quick action on Supreme Court reform, and some Republicans are proposing a constitutional amendment that would lock in the number of justices at nine.

This opinion piece was assembled using statements from Republican senators in 2016 as they were trying to prevent President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee from being confirmed. Senators argued the election was happening too soon (though it was almost eight months away) and that appointing a new justice would prevent Americans from having their say

Rarely does a Supreme Court vacancy occur in the final year of a presidential term.1 It makes the current presidential election all that more important, as not only are the next four years in play, but an entire generation of Americans will be impacted by the balance of the court and its rulings.2

The American people are presented with an exceedingly rare opportunity to decide, in a very real and concrete way, the direction the court will take.3

A divided Senate voted Monday night to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, capping a lightning-fast Senate approval that handed President Trump a victory only days before the election and promised to tip the court to the right for years to come.

A divided Senate voted Monday night to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, capping a lightning-fast Senate approval that handed President Trump a victory only days before the election and promised to tip the court to the right for years to come.

Republicans overcame unanimous opposition by Democrats to make Judge Barrett the 115th justice of the Supreme Court and the fifth woman ever to sit on its bench.

Senate Republicans voted to confirm President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett on Monday, a major victory for the President and his party just days before November 3, that could push the high court in a more conservative direction for generations to come.

The vote was 52-48. Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who is in a tough reelection fight, was the only GOP senator to cross party lines and vote with Democrats against the nomination after having expressed concerns that it's too close to Election Day to consider a nominee.

The stakes in the Supreme Court battle are immense and come at a pivotal time in American politics in the run up to an election in which control of Congress and the White House are on the line.

President Barack Obama said that upon becoming president he was “surprised” at the severity of partisanship in Washington -- and that it continues to shock him even now.

If members of Congress “think that it’s harder for them to get re-elected by cooperating with each other, then they won’t cooperate,” he said, citing the Senate’s refusal to consider appeals court Judge Merrick Garland, his nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February.

When you add up these excuses, what you see is a party full of lawyers and spin doctors defending the indefensible. They’re not rationalizing racism. What they’re rationalizing is holding their party together even if that means supporting a racist.

To protect this man, Republicans have discarded every principle. The party of conservatism celebrates disruption. Absolutists who insist that their presidential nominee treat the unborn as equals require no such commitment to Mexican Americans. Moralists who spent the Clinton administration preaching about character treat persistent race baiting as a matter of communications strategy. Some Republicans discount Trump’s slurs as old news while others discount them because he’s a nice man who otherwise never talks that way.

Party leaders agonize over the nominee’s commitment to entitlement cuts but treat racism as a detail. Politicians who brag about saying “radical Islamic terrorist” get cute about the meaning of “racist.” The chairman of the committee investigating Hillary Clinton becomes a permissive subjectivist. A senator who ran for president opposing his own immigration bill develops a deep commitment to his promise to support Trump. The Senate leader who set out to thwart a newly elected president in 2009 suddenly preaches the primacy of the people’s will.

the culture of intelligence has been in free-fall since the financial crisis of 2008. While people may be pretending to follow intelligence, impostors in both the analyst and executive camps actually follow shallow, fake processes that justify their existing decisions and past investments.

three trends are making this harder

the explosion of cheap capital from Wall Street has led major industries to consolidate. Where a sector such as pharmaceuticals or telecommunications (and, of course, banking) might have had dozens of big players a couple of decades ago, now it has closer to five. When I began in the intelligence industry 15 years ago, I did projects for Compaq, Amoco, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and Cingular -- all of which have since been rolled into the conglomerates of Hewlett Packard, British Petroleum, Pfizer, and AT&T. There are fewer firms for an intelligence analyst to track, and their behavior has to be understood on totally different terms than when this discipline was created.