Farewell to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was fired Thursday, joining the pantheon of President Donald Trump’s awful cabinet secretaries who learned the hard way that there’s no pleasing a fundamentally unreasonable person.

As terrible as Bondi was, her ultimate failing was that she didn’t go far enough for Trump in trashing the rule of law in America. So while it may be tempting to celebrate her departure, her firing bodes ill for the state of our democracy. Whoever comes next could likely be a bigger threat.

The onetime Florida AG was narrowly confirmed as Trump’s second choice to lead the DOJ after it became clear that his first pick, the horrible Matt Gaetz, would not make it through a confirmation process even with a pliant Republican Senate filled with lackeys and the weak-willed.

Bondi wasn’t as outlandish as Gaetz; her scandal was that she was never a credible steward of the impartial rule of law and this nation’s potent law enforcement apparatus, something she proved many times over during her short sojourn.

In the end, her greatest transgression in Trump’s eyes was not that she had scorn for the law, but in fact that she was not able to violate laws and norms and bend reality exactly to his vision, and so she’s out.

The things that Trump wants often are either impossible or at the very least illegal, and he has no understanding of or interest in the reasons why. Even as sycophantic of an attack dog as Bondi was, she has not been able to entirely reformulate American jurisprudence such that the president gets to arrest his political enemies, indefinitely occupy politically-oppositional cities, institute whatever economic policies he likes, ignore court orders and so on.

Each of these efforts would tarnish a reputation, but if there is one lasting legacy of Bondi’s time at the helm, it will be the Epstein files. Over the course of one year, she went from claiming that the Epstein client list was sitting on her desk ready for release, to giving right-wing influencers binders of information that was already public, to dismissing the entire fiasco out of hand, to actively violating a federal law requiring the files’ full airing.

Bondi kept saying that everything has been published, but then there is more.

This embarrassing about-face and dynamiting of any integrity she might have had left is unlikely to matter in the grand scheme of things, as we will all get to see the files and the full extent of Trump’s involvement in them sooner or later anyway, but history will remember what she did.

In the end, Bondi was rewarded for her willingness to violate her professional responsibilities and oath of office with being unceremoniously shown the door, a predictable outcome in the context of a president for whom loyalty only ever runs one way.

We don’t expect Todd Blanche, the deputy AG and now acting DOJ boss, to be any more committed to legal and constitutional principles than Bondi has been. But we do expect him to find, just as she did, that it is rather difficult to single-handedly kneecap 2½ centuries of relative jurisprudential institutional stability, especially through a department that’s losing attorneys and their expertise left and right and angering even conservative federal judges with its defiance as public support craters.

The Senate should remember that its advice and consent function is a serious exercise of its own power, and never just a formality. The prospect of confirmation failure already derailed Gaetz; the body should make clear that it will not consider anyone, Blanche or otherwise, that won’t recommit to the rule of law, on the Epstein files and all else.

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