Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement yesterday that he is resigning puts finished—almost—to the most politicized and lawless tenure at the Department of Justice in our nation’s history (so far).
The nation’s outgoing top cop was ideologically-driven and played the race card constantly, viewing his fellow Americans as a “nation of cowards.”
Mr. Holder extracted large settlements from banks on flimsy charges, giving President Obama class war bragging rights during the 2012 Presidential campaign.
He attempted to treat enemy combatant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of September 11, 2001, as just another criminal who should be tried in downtown Manhattan, “which showed a failure to understand our war on terrorism.”
And does anybody believe that the Department of Justice is actually conducting an investigation of the IRS, as it claims? As somebody pointed out, disgraced former IRS official Lois Lerner, who pled the Fifth Amendment before Congress, risked granting an interview to Politico only because she knew she was safe to talk because the DOJ wasn’t really pursuing the truth.
All these sins of Holder pale before his most important one. John Yoo writes this morning in National Review:
But worst of all was not Holder’s political or prosecution choices, but his refusal to obey the Constitution. The AG is the nation’s law-enforcement officer, second only to the president. His most important job is to interpret and enforce the Constitution for the executive branch. On Holder’s watch, the Obama administration has refused to carry out the laws, as required by the Constitution’s Take Care Clause, in areas ranging from Obamacare to immigration to welfare. The only exception to the president’s duty to carry out the acts of Congress is if the laws themselves are unconstitutional and hence violate the higher law. But in all of these cases, the Obama administration knew that these laws raised no constitutional problems — it merely disagreed with the policies, even with laws that it supported during enactment. Obama and Holder created for themselves a second, absolute veto on acts of Congress.
Holder and his supporters, who know these decisions violate the Constitution but kept silent because of their partisan support for Obama, will rue their abuse of presidential power. Future presidents will be able to change tax rates or refuse to prosecute political supporters under these theories. Future conservative presidents may use the same claim to start dismantling the overgrown welfare state without the assent of Congress. We happily see Holder go, but he will have more regret not just looking back at the controversies that wracked the Department of Justice under his care, but when he ponders the future when conservative AGs turn his precedents against the bloated welfare state that he loves.
The Wall Street Journal succinctly sums up the Holder era:
One would be hard put to identify an Attorney General who so explicitly turned the Justice Department into a political weapon, and for an office occupied by Bobby Kennedy and John Mitchell, that is saying something. …
Even the timing of his resignation is politically driven, coming before the midterm elections so that Senate Democrats in the lame-duck session that reconvenes in November can confirm Mr. Holder's successor with 51 votes. The new Attorney General will be the product of Senator Harry Reid's "nuclear option." The Holder era will be known as one in which politics usually trumped the law.
One would hope that John Yoo’s dire predictions don’t come true, that future presidents will restore the Constitution to its proper place and appoint Attorneys General who will uphold the law rather than pursuing political advantage. But it won’t be soon and it may never happen.