Todd Blanche can be the attorney general American children need
Washington Examiner · RC · trust 25/100
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Wednesday on the nomination of Todd Blanche to be attorney general. He was deputy AG from March 2025 to April 2026, when he assumed the AG position in an acting capacity after the ouster of then-AG Pam Bondi. The children of this country need a champion who will fight the growing sexual exploitation crisis targeting them. Blanche can be that champion.
Specifically, however, Blanche must fulfill two legal obligations that his predecessors of both parties neglected. First, Congress in 2008 unanimously passed the PROTECT Our Children Act, which requires the attorney general to “create and implement a National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction” and to submit it to Congress by Oct. 13, 2009. Then-Attorney General Eric Holder did not do so until August 2010, nearly a year later.
The law also requires the AG to submit an updated strategy to Congress “by February 1 of every second thereafter.” Here’s the sad tale of non-compliance: Holder never submitted the reports due in 2011 or 2013; Attorney General Loretta Lynch submitted the report due in 2015 more than a year late; Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr never submitted the reports due in 2017 and 2019; Attorney General Merrick Garland submitted the report due in 2023 nearly six months late; Attorney General Pam Bondi never submitted the report due last year.
Of the nine reports required by the 2008 POCA, attorneys general have submitted only three, all of them months late.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, July 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Ten years after passing the PROTECT Our Children Act, Congress unanimously passed a law to improve the process for providing restitution to child pornography victims. The federal restitution law was almost three decades old at that point, enacted before the internet was commercially available. That technology, however, soon made obsolete the traditional way of assessing the harm to victims and calculating restitution owed by perpetrators. The 2018 law created new options for victims, including receiving a lump sum from a new victim assistance fund . Data from the Sentencing Commission show that this approach has dramatically increased the percentage of child pornography defendants required to pay restitution as well as the median restitution award that victims actually receive.
The law also required the attorney general to submit to Congress a report on “the progress of the Department of Justice in implementing the amendments made by [the new restitution law] … [which] shall include an assessment of the funding levels” for the victim assistance fund. That report was due “not later than” Dec. 7, 2020. It has never been submitted.
More than four decades ago, in New York v. Ferber , the Supreme Court recognized that “the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse of children constitutes a government objective of surpassing importance .” But in a 2022 report , the Government Accountability Office examined the record and concluded instead that the Justice Department was simply “not making the strategy a priority.”
In April, which was Child Abuse Awareness Month, a coalition of more than 60 national and state organizations wrote to Blanche about these specific responsibilities, but there’s been no response. When the Senate confirms him as the next attorney general, he can change course, close the door on the failures of the past, and step up to be the leader children need.
Tom Jipping is a senior legal fellow at the Ed Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom.
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