Nominee to lead the federal whistleblower office withdraws hours before his hearing over leaked texts.

The Office of Special Counsel is the small federal agency that exists, by statute, to protect career federal employees who blow the whistle on misconduct in the rest of the federal government. It is supposed to be a refuge. The whole point of the agency is that the people who run it are supposed to not be the kind of people who think the country’s largest federal holiday for a Black American should be, in the nominee’s own quoted text messages, “tossed into the seventh circle of hell.”

The nominee’s name is Paul Ingrassia. The texts are from a private group chat, leaked to Politico. The texts include, by the nominee’s own published lines, references to having “a Nazi streak,” to wanting “every single one” of several holidays “eviscerated,” and a racial slur deployed against the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Juneteenth, Kwanzaa, and Black History Month. The nominee’s lawyer, asked to authenticate the texts, did not deny they were sent. The lawyer’s defense was that the texts were “satirical.”

Hon. Satirical is what people say when the joke does not land and they need a second word for it.

The withdrawal happened Tuesday night. The Senate hearing was Thursday. By Tuesday afternoon four Republican senators had said publicly that they would not vote for confirmation. The nominee did the math on the Senate floor and got out before the hearing.

You ever notice how the vetting is the part that never seems to come up. The man was nominated by the President to run a federal agency. Somebody in the West Wing read the file and pushed the nomination forward. That somebody did not catch the texts. Or that somebody caught the texts and did not think they were a problem. Either answer is a story.

I have been a waitress for thirty years. I know what it is like to have somebody walk into the diner and start a conversation that the rest of us at the counter all stop and look up at. The conversation here is not the texts. The conversation is who in the building thought the texts were not a disqualifier.

The withdrawal is good. The withdrawal is the one thing that worked. The four Republican senators are the system doing its job.

The system doing its job one time, on the eve of the hearing, is not the same thing as the system working.

That ought to concern you.