# Merrick Garland **Merrick Brian Garland** (b. November 13, 1952) is an American jurist who served as U.S. Attorney General from March 2021 through January 2025, and before that as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1997 to 2021, its Chief Judge from 2013 to 2020. He is best known for something that did not happen to him by his own choice: the 293-day Senate blockade of his 2016 Supreme Court nomination, which became the modern template for the partisan capture of judicial nominations. Garland is one of the vault's most useful figures precisely because he is not a partisan actor. He is the test case for a specific proposition — that procedural restraint, exercised unilaterally, is a durable strategy. The record is not kind to the proposition. ## Before the bench Harvard College, then Harvard Law. Clerkships with Judge Henry Friendly on the Second Circuit and Justice William J. Brennan Jr. on the [[Supreme Court of the United States]]. He then joined [[Arnold & Porter]], where, as he put it on returning decades later, he "first learned how to be a lawyer." The formative period was the Justice Department in the mid-1990s, where he served as the number two in the deputy attorney general's office under Jamie Gorelick. In that role he supervised the [[Oklahoma City Bombing]] investigation and prosecution — flying to Oklahoma City within two days of the April 1995 attack, having been told by Attorney General Janet Reno en route that he would be conducting [[Timothy McVeigh]]'s initial hearing that night. Two decisions from that case define him. When officials proposed holding McVeigh's initial appearance on a military base, closed to the public, Garland refused: *"We don't want to do it that way. The law requires an open hearing."* And he required a subpoena or a warrant for every piece of evidence collected, explicitly to avoid the procedural collapse then unfolding in the O.J. Simpson trial. He also consolidated competing jurisdictions under a single FBI lead. The through-line — that legitimacy is procedural, and that shortcuts taken for speed cost you the verdict — is the same instinct that would later be read as paralysis. ## The Garland precedent President [[Barack Obama]] nominated Garland to replace [[Antonin Scalia]] on March 16, 2016. Senate Majority Leader [[Mitch McConnell]], coordinating with [[Senate Judiciary Committee]] chair [[Chuck Grassley]], announced within hours of Scalia's death that no nominee from a sitting president in an election year would receive a hearing or a vote. The committee held none; the Senate held none; the nomination expired with the Obama presidency on January 3, 2017. [[Neil Gorsuch]] took the seat. The rule was then **inverted** in 2020. When [[Ruth Bader Ginsburg]] died on September 18, 2020, McConnell and Grassley confirmed [[Amy Coney Barrett]] in 39 days — eight days before the presidential election. The stated principle (election-year nominations are illegitimate) was discarded for its inverse (election-year nominations are fine when the Senate majority and the president share a party), without explanation and without cost. This is the modal case in the vault for **unilateral norm destruction**: a procedural convention that exists only because both parties observe it can be ended by one party alone, and the party that ends it captures the entire benefit. It belongs alongside the [[Blue Slip]] erosion and the judicial-pipeline work of the [[Federalist Society]] and [[Leonard Leo]] — the blockade was not an improvisation but the enabling move for a confirmation project already built and waiting. There is a smaller irony worth recording. McConnell and Grassley had both already voted against Garland once, in 1997, when his D.C. Circuit nomination — which sat for roughly a year and a half — finally cleared the Senate **76–23**. ## Attorney General, 2021–2025 Confirmed **70–30 on March 10, 2021**, Garland took office with a stated objective of restoring the Justice Department's reputation for independence. His method was scrupulous distance: no public commentary on investigations, no visible coordination with the White House, and the routing of every politically exposed matter to a special counsel. He appointed three. **[[Jack Smith]]** (November 2022) took the January 6 election-subversion case and the [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]]. **[[Robert Hur]]** (January 2023) took the Biden classified-documents matter. **[[David Weiss]]** (August 2023) took the Hunter Biden tax and firearms prosecutions. Appointing a special counsel to investigate the sitting president's son, and another to investigate the sitting president, was the clearest available demonstration that the department was not an arm of the White House — and it bought him nothing politically from either direction. The January 6 prosecutions were the largest investigation in DOJ history, running bottom-up from the rioters toward the organizers. Republican critics called the whole apparatus politicized persecution. Critics on the left argued the sequencing was the fatal error: two years spent establishing the base of the pyramid meant the case against [[Donald Trump]] himself was not filed until August 2023, which left it hostage to the electoral calendar. Both Smith cases were wound down after the 2024 election under DOJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president. Volume I of Smith's report was released in January 2025; Volume II remains suppressed under [[Aileen Cannon]]'s order — the saga tracked at [[Jack Smith Report Volume II]]. ## The unresolved question Was the institutionalism vindicated or catastrophic? The case for vindication: Garland's restraint means nothing DOJ did under him can be honestly characterized as directing prosecution at political enemies, and that record is now the baseline against which the successor department is measured. The case for catastrophe: restraint that is not reciprocated is not a norm, it is a handicap, and a two-year head start on the January 6 leadership might have produced a verdict before the election made one impossible. The vault does not resolve this, because it is the central strategic question facing every institutionalist actor in the period — the same question that runs through the [[Power of the Purse]] fights and the courts. Garland is simply the cleanest instance of it. Since **May 2025** he has been a partner in the appellate and Supreme Court practice at [[Arnold & Porter]]. ## See Also - [[Mitch McConnell]] — architect of the 2016 blockade - [[Chuck Grassley]] — Judiciary chair who declined to hold hearings, and a 1997 no vote - [[Amy Coney Barrett]] — the 2020 inversion - [[Neil Gorsuch]] — who filled the seat instead - [[Federalist Society]] · [[Leonard Leo]] — the pipeline the blockade served - [[Jack Smith]] · [[Robert Hur]] · [[David Weiss]] — the three special counsels - [[Jack Smith Report Volume II]] — the suppressed volume - [[Oklahoma City Bombing]] · [[Timothy McVeigh]] — the formative prosecution - [[Blue Slip]] — the parallel norm erosion in lower-court confirmations