Donald Kinsella was sworn in as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York on Wednesday. By that evening, he was out of the job.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the firing on X with a message that left no room for ambiguity:

"Judges don't pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does."

"See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella."

Kinsella, a veteran prosecutor with more than 50 years of experience as a criminal and civil litigator, had been appointed by federal judges in the Northern District of New York, The Hill reported. He'd served as an assistant U.S. attorney for much of the 1990s, rose to criminal chief of the district's prosecuting office, and retired from federal service in 2002. None of that mattered. The constitutional question at the center of this fight is straightforward, even if the legal skirmishing around it has been anything but.

The Constitutional Fault Line

Article II of the Constitution vests the appointment of principal officers — including U.S. attorneys — in the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate. There is a statutory mechanism that allows federal judges to appoint interim U.S. attorneys when vacancies arise, but it was designed as a stopgap, not a workaround for Senate confirmation.

That distinction matters. When federal judges start selecting the prosecutors who will set enforcement priorities across entire districts, they are exercising a power that the framers deliberately placed elsewhere. Prosecutors don't just apply the law — they decide which laws to enforce, which cases to bring, and how aggressively to pursue them. Those are executive decisions. Keeping that authority tethered to the elected president isn't a power grab. It's the design.

The White House clearly sees these judicial appointments as an encroachment, and the speed of Kinsella's removal signals that the administration has no intention of letting the practice stand unchallenged.

A Pattern Across Multiple Districts

The Northern District of New York is far from the only battleground. The administration has clashed with federal judges over U.S. attorney appointments in New Jersey, Nevada, California, and New Mexico, making similar moves to convert prosecutors from interim to acting U.S. attorneys — bypassing the judges' selections entirely.

In New Jersey, the conflict followed a particularly winding path. Former U.S. attorney Alina Habba — a onetime personal lawyer to Trump — saw her temporary tenure end in July after federal judges declined to extend her term. Those judges then invoked a seldom-used power to appoint her next-in-command. Attorney General Pam Bondi responded by firing the judges' selected successor and giving Habba the title of acting U.S. attorney alongside the full powers of the office.

A federal appeals court upheld Habba's disqualification. She resigned — but said she would return if a higher court reversed the decision.

In the Northern District of New York itself, the administration's previous pick, John Sarcone III, had his tenure declared unlawful by a judge. Sarcone had no prosecutorial experience before Trump tapped him for the role, and the Justice Department maneuvered to keep him in place after federal judges declined to extend his term. The court found that the arrangement violated statutory procedure.

Kinsella was the judges' answer to that vacancy. The White House's answer to Kinsella took about six hours.

The Halligan Fallout

The stakes of these appointment fights extend well beyond personnel disputes. In the Eastern District of Virginia, then-U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan was disqualified, and her disqualification led to the dismissal of prosecutions against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Halligan has since left the Justice Department. Both the disqualification and the dismissals are on appeal.

That's the real cost of losing these fights. When a prosecutor's authority is retroactively invalidated, every case she touched becomes vulnerable. The administration isn't waging these battles over org charts. It's waging them because the alternative is watching high-profile prosecutions evaporate on procedural technicalities — technicalities manufactured by judges asserting appointment powers the Constitution doesn't give them.

Who Picks the Prosecutors?

The left will frame this as an authoritarian purge. That framing requires you to believe that unelected federal judges selecting prosecutors is somehow more democratic than a president doing it — the president who actually won a national election and whose administration bears responsibility for law enforcement outcomes. It's a strange version of democracy that routes around the only person in the process who answers to voters.

There's also a deeper irony. For years, progressives have argued that prosecutorial discretion is an awesome and consequential power — that who serves as U.S. attorney shapes everything from sentencing patterns to civil rights enforcement. They're right about that. Which makes their sudden enthusiasm for letting judges hand-pick those prosecutors all the more revealing. The principle isn't "prosecutorial power must be checked." The principle is "prosecutorial power must be ours."

The administration has been blunt about where it stands. Blanche's post wasn't a legal memo — it was a two-sentence constitutional argument delivered at the speed of social media. Whether courts ultimately agree on every procedural question, the underlying claim is solid: the president appoints U.S. attorneys. That's not an innovation. It's Article II.

Donald Kinsella had a long and credentialed career. His firing wasn't personal. It was structural — a White House making clear that no matter how many times federal judges reach for the appointment power, the executive branch will reach back.