Todd Blanche, President Trump's former personal defense lawyer and now acting US attorney general, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 15, 2026, for the first of two scheduled confirmation hearing days The Guardian. Blanche, 51, has held the department's top job in an acting capacity since Trump fired Pam Bondi, and the hearing marks the formal test of whether he keeps it on a permanent basis.

The committee's own calendar lists the session for 9:00 a.m. in the Hart Senate Office Building, classified simply as a "Nomination Hearing" Senate Judiciary Committee. A second day of testimony follows on July 16, a structure the panel had mapped out since mid-June, when Newsday and Federal News Network both flagged that Republicans on the committee were still weighing their level of support ahead of the sessions Newsday Federal News Network.

That reported hesitancy matters mechanically. With Democrats unified in opposition, a single Republican "no" on the committee is enough to sink the nomination before it ever reaches the Senate floor, according to AFP's reporting carried by the Guardian The Guardian/AFP. That arithmetic puts unusual weight on the private lobbying that has preceded the hearing. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the committee's chairman, met with Blanche last month and issued a public statement afterward describing the meeting Senate Judiciary Committee — the kind of pre-hearing courtesy call that, in a committee this closely balanced, doubles as a signal to watch for wavering votes.

Blanche arrives at the dais carrying baggage accumulated during his months running the department on an acting basis. Committee Democrats first went public in a January 2025 press release demanding he answer "dozens of oversight requests" they said the Justice Department had ignored Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats. That pressure has not let up: a July 1, 2026 letter from Judiciary Democrats to the department addressed him as "Acting Attorney General Blanche" while renewing the same category of outstanding requests Senate Judiciary Committee letter. Expect Democratic members to use their question time on both hearing days to press him on the specific requests still unanswered, rather than relitigating his broader qualifications.

The nomination also has vocal outside advocates. Mike Davis, writing in Fox News opinion the day before the hearing, urged the Senate to confirm Blanche and dismissed criticism tied to an unnamed "Obama judge" attack on the nominee Fox News. Piece placement like that, timed to land the day before gavel-in, is a familiar Washington ritual ahead of contested confirmations — signaling to wavering Republicans which way conservative legal circles want them to move.

The broader context here is that acting-capacity leadership at Justice has become something of a norm rather than an exception in recent cycles, and Blanche's confirmation fight will test whether the Senate still treats permanent Senate-confirmed leadership as a meaningful check on that trend. A committee this evenly divided means the hearing itself, not the eventual floor vote, is likely the real decision point.

Separately, and unrelated to the Blanche proceedings, former President Joe Biden's publisher confirmed the title and release date of his forthcoming memoir on the same day. Little, Brown and Company told the Associated Press that "Promise Me, America" will be published November 17, 2026, a date falling roughly two weeks after the midterm elections AP. AP's headline — "Biden will publish a memoir after the midterm elections" — was the first public report of the book, with the publisher having gone directly to the wire service rather than issuing a broader release AP.

Hachette Book Group's own listing for the title, filed under ISBN-13 9781668656358, describes the book as "moving, historic, and filled with the unyielding optimism that has defined Joe Biden's fifty years of public service" Hachette Book Group. Notably, the listing's URL slug still reads "author-to-be-announced/untitled-american-history," a placeholder evidently never updated after the title and jacket art were finalized — a small housekeeping detail, but one that suggests the announcement moved faster than the publisher's own web infrastructure. Coverage from the Orlando Sentinel indicates the memoir will range across topics including the economy and Biden's decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race Orlando Sentinel.

The post-midterms timing of the release is unlikely to be incidental for a publisher weighing sales against political noise, though neither Biden's camp nor Little, Brown has offered public reasoning for the specific date. A memoir landing after ballots are counted avoids competing directly with campaign-season news cycles while still positioning the book ahead of the traditional holiday retail season — a scheduling logic publishers have used for past political memoirs regardless of who occupied the White House.