By Robert Knight
Saturday, October 11, 2014
For six years, Eric Holder has built a legacy that
delights liberals and appalls conservatives, especially those who revere the
Constitution.
Right out of the box, during Black History Month in 2009,
Mr. Holder accused his countrymen of being “a nation of cowards” on racial
matters. He followed that up by dropping charges against nightstick-wielding
New Black Panther Party members who had been caught on video intimidating
voters at a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.
Since then, he has operated the Justice Department as a
blunt political instrument to reward Mr. Obama’s friends and punish his
opponents, running roughshod over the rule of law.
On Sept. 25, Mr. Holder announced that he would resign as
soon as President Obama appoints a successor. These are big shoes to fill. To
help understand what the job might entail, here’s a handy classified ad:
Wanted: Nominee for U.S. Attorney General – Must have
thick skin in case Congress finds in contempt; adept at using redacted version
of Constitution regarding separation of powers; proficient at forgetting oath
to uphold laws; must regard terrorist suspects as no more than criminal
suspects; must view illegal aliens as undocumented U.S. citizens; must view
world through racially tinted glasses; must be able, with straight face, to
compare common-sense election safeguards like voter photo ID laws to racist Jim
Crow-era abominations; must subordinate all other civil rights to “gay rights”;
must ignore Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) criminal targeting of conservative
groups and leaking confidential tax returns; must ignore IRS’s rewriting of
Obamacare subsidies, and believe agency’s claim of inability to recover “lost”
e-mails of key personnel like Lois Lerner; must be able to harass reporters and
whistleblowers without ticking off ACLU too much.
There’s a bit more, because these are, well, big shoes to
fill: Must be able to make colorful, Chicago-style threats to cheeky
congressmen who ask too many questions about such things as Fast and Furious
gun-running scandal; must be conversant in zingers like, “you don’t want to go
there, buddy.”
In his book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the
Obama Justice Department, former DOJ Voting Section attorney J. Christian Adams
describes the Civil Rights Division under Mr. Holder as “a soap opera, within a
cabal, surrounded by a racialist culture of dysfunction.” Elsewhere, he
describes the “racial bias and leftwing extremism that pervade the
institution.”
In December 2009, Mr. Adams’ boss, Voting Section Chief
H. Christopher Coates, a former ACLU lawyer, stepped down and left Washington
for the U.S. Attorney’s office in South Carolina. In May 2010, Mr. Adams resigned,
accusing Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights nominee Thomas E. Perez of
providing false testimony under oath about racially selective law enforcement
at DOJ. Mr. Perez, who was confirmed and later went on to become Secretary of
Labor, has been mentioned as a possible successor to Mr. Holder.
Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Coates testified before the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission and to Congress, noting that DOJ attorneys had been
told to ignore voting law violation complaints filed by non-minorities.
In 2009, at a farewell party upon his reassignment to
South Carolina, Mr. Coates gave a jeremiad about the DOJ losing its way: “One
of these most basic standards is equal protection under the law. When that is
violated, America does not live up to the true meaning of its creed. …For the
Justice Department to enforce the Voting Rights Act only to protect members of
certain minority groups breaches the fundamental guarantee of equal protection,
and could substantially erode public support for the Voting Rights Act itself.”
Not just the Voting Rights Act. Mr. Holder’s refusal in
2011 to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and even to instruct DOJ
attorneys to undermine it in the federal courts showed utter contempt for not
only the rule of law, but for the nation’s lawmakers. DOMA was enacted in 1996
with overwhelming votes of 85-14 in the Senate and 342-67 in the House, and was
signed by President Clinton.
Fifteen years later, Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder decided
they didn’t like the law and refused to enforce it, violating their oaths of
office to uphold federal statutes. This was the first strong signal that the
Obama Administration would treat the law as little more than a suggestion,
depending on which constituency it was favoring.
President Obama himself has a long record of lawlessness
and overreach, and it could not have been assembled without his enabler at
Justice.
Mr. Holder will be missed by the people who view Mr.
Obama’s reign as “payback time” and who are intent on abusing the law to advance
their goal of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
For the rest of us, we can breathe a sigh of relief –
until the next ideologue lands in the attorney general’s seat.
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