Senator burned by Trump says he’s ‘prepared to vote no’ on Todd Blanche: ‘President could fix this in minute’

A key Republican senator negotiating with the White House and the Department of Justice over the confirmation of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Thursday that the two sides are still at odds.

Blanche’s nomination to take over his role on a permanent basis was supposed to go through its first vote in committee on Thursday morning. Instead, that vote was called off as a group of holdout Republicans refuse to vote “yes” on Blanche’s nomination until the DoJ guarantees that it will not set up a once-planned $1.776 billion “weaponization fund” which the Senate has derided as a “slush fund”.

Speaking on MS Now, Sen. John Cornyn told reporter Ali Vitali that he was prepared to vote “no” on Blanche unless the White House and DoJ accepted his terms. The administration has stated that the fund is “dead”, but Cornyn and his colleagues are concerned that the text of a settlement with the president’s legal team still could require it to be set up. They also oppose a provision giving Trump perpetual immunity from IRS audits of his finances prior to May 19, 2026.

“I am prepared to vote no, but I do think I owe it to my constituents and to Mr. Blanche to try to negotiate in good faith, and that’s what we’ve been doing,” Cornyn told MS Now.

He added: The president “could fix this in a minute”.

His office separately confirmed that the senator delivered a counter-proposal to the agency Wednesday evening after the debate initially threatened to derail Blanche’s vote. DoJ officials confirmed Wednesday evening that they remain in contact with Cornyn’s office.

The so-called “weaponization fund” was birthed from a settlement between Donald Trump’s legal team and the IRS the Department of Justice engineered after Trump took office in 2025. In a press release, the DoJ claimed that the fund would be used to “provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare” allegedly committed by the agency.

But it was met with immediate revulsion in Congress, with moderate Republicans in both chambers joining with Democrats to condemn it and describe it as a “slush fund” designed to reward Trump’s allies with lucrative payouts. Controversy immediately erupted over whether the funds could be used to reward January 6 rioters who were successfully prosecuted by the Biden Justice Department, then pardoned by Trump after he took office.

“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong – Take your pick,” former GOP leader said in May.

Funding for it was left out of the Republicans’ second reconciliation package last month, but Cornyn and his holdout colleagues have gone further by demanding it be written out of existence altogether.

Few on the Hill or in the White House view it as a coincidence that both of the Republicans threatening to vote “no” are members who’ve been politically burned by the president. In Cornyn’s case, he lost a runoff election for his own seat after Trump endorsed against him this cycle, while Sen. Thom Tillis’s dispute with Trump dates back to his opposition to the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” last year. Tillis announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election as it was clear he’d likely face a Trump-backed challenger.

But Cornyn once again insisted on Thursday that his opposition to Blanche’s confirmation didn’t stem from personal animus, instead political disagreement.

Noting that a phone call with the president would help and that he hadn’t spoken with Trump at all about the stalemate, Cornyn told MS Now on Thursday that his voting record spoke for itself.

“You know, I’ve voted with him 99.3% of the time. That has nothing to do with it. This is about making sure that even if you’re the president of the United States, you don’t get favorable terms from the government in a settlement of a lawsuit that ordinary citizens would not get, like protections from audits by the IRS for the forseeable future.”