Sen. Tim Scott is having a hard time standing out amongst the 2024 GOP field, with most national polling showing him at below four percent. But according to MSNBC's Steve Benen, Scott seems to think his line of attack against Attorney General Merrick Garland will help his poor poll numbers.
“When I’m president, the first thing I’ll do is fire Merrick Garland," Scott said during Wednesday night's first GOP debate in a message he used for a fundraising pitch the following day.
Benen writes that as campaign promises go, "this one is a little odd."
"Garland is, after all, a political appointee. A Democratic president — in this case, Joe Biden — took office in 2021 and chose officials for his White House cabinet, tapping the attorney general to lead the Department of Justice," Benen writes. "Biden didn’t have to fire Donald Trump’s cabinet secretaries because they’d already left: In nearly every instance, new presidents, especially those replacing a successor from a different party, replace old political appointees with new ones. It’s just how the process works."
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Benen goes on to point out that if Biden were to lose in 2024, "there’d be no reason for the new Republican president to put firing Garland at the top of his or her to-do list, because the attorney general wouldn’t still be in office on Inauguration Day."
Read the full op-ed over at MSNBC.
