The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 8 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Suddenly, President Donald Trump is on the verge of losing a big one. Ed Martin, his hand-picked nominee for U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., a major MAGA loyalist and insurrectionist sympathizer, is in trouble after a key GOP senator announced his opposition. Remarkably, this comes as Trump erupted on Truth Social this week, demanding that GOP senators confirm Martin. And that also comes as Trump has reportedly been privately calling GOP senators to demand their support. Lost in this whole saga has been the basic question of why we don’t want a MAGA-brained January Sixer to be U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., in the first place; it’s kind of an important job when it comes to maintaining the rule of law. So we’re talking about all this with someone who knows the Justice Department: former federal prosecutor Kristy Parker, now counsel at Protect Democracy. Kristy, thanks for coming on.

Kristy Parker: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: This week, Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina announced his opposition to Ed Martin, who’s currently interim U.S. attorney and is hoping for Senate confirmation. Tillis’s main objection is that Martin is a 2020 election denier who was at the Capitol during Trump’s January 6 insurrection. Martin has also suggested the people who attacked cops that day were part of a false flag operation. And Tillis specifically criticized Martin for siding with Trump on the pardon of some of the worst January 6 attackers. Kristy, how often do we hear Republicans do what Tillis just did, and why is it so important?

Parker: Well, I certainly think it is not unprecedented for members of the United States Senate who are from the same party as the president to exercise their independent advice and consent roles. So from that point of view, this is just run-of-the-mill Senate doing its constitutional job, which no one should really be that surprised by. However, this is a highly political time that we live in with a president who demands loyalty from the rest of the party. So in that sense, it can be seen as somewhat remarkable for this moment.

Sargent: It’s being treated as a massive story that a Republican is breaking with Trump on this. I would go further and say Trump demands absolute fealty from the Republican Party’s most important players. He essentially subjugates them, no matter how high their stature is in the party. And so it seems to me we’re seeing something remarkable here.

Parker: Well, again, I think my rejoinder to that would be simply is that it really shouldn’t be remarkable. What we should be focused on is that we have three branches of government. They each have a job to do. The president is the head of one of those branches of government. He is not the king. So when we see things like we’ve seen for the last two months—courts saying, X thing is unlawful. You cannot do this thing—or now seeing a member of the Senate who has a constitutional duty to provide advice and consent doing that, that really shouldn’t be remarkable. That should be something that we’re all happy to see, that every member of our government should celebrate—because that is the system that our founders put in place so that we would have a democratic republic and not a monarchy.

Sargent: Well, I’m certainly celebrating it. I hope it lasts. We should clarify that right now, the opposition from Tillis, who’s a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, means Ed Martin’s nomination can’t get out of the committee for the time being. And other GOP senators are suggesting it might not be able to happen at all. While that could always change, for now he looks like he’s in real trouble. But Kristy, let’s step back. Can you tell us more broadly a little bit about the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington, D.C., what its role is, and why it matters so much for the rule of law?

Parker: Sure. So there are 93 or maybe 94 U.S. attorney’s offices in the country that are arms of the Department of Justice, but they are very individually important everywhere. They are federal law enforcements in their individual jurisdictions, and they are primarily responsible for executing the laws and........

© New Republic