http://washingtonexaminer.com/eric-holders-political-justice/article/2554041Eric Holder's political justice
BY WASHINGTON EXAMINER | SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 | 5:00 AM
Upon Attorney General Eric Holder's resignation last week, NBC's Chuck Todd made an odd comment: “[W]hat’s interesting about him, he is a very non-political person.”
There may be merit to saying Holder has been more ideological than political, but it still seems like a strange thing to say about him. After all, his most famous act before his tenure as Attorney General had been to help arrange President Bill Clinton's highly unusual and controversial last minute pardon of a wanted fugitive — mega-donor and billionaire Marc Rich. Holder not only recommended the pardon (calling himself “neutral leaning favorable”) but was also careful not to inform his colleagues at the Clinton Justice Department until it was too late to stop it.
Louisiana families benefiting from that state's new school voucher program might wince at this “non-political” label given that Holder sued to block the program. His cynical justification was a decades-old court order whose purpose had been to block the state from funneling money to all-white private schools to undermine public school desegregation. The voucher program, of course, does the opposite, paying for some low-income students, 90 percent of whom are black, to attend private schools if they choose. Holder quietly backed down last year from this naked bid to placate the state teachers' union, an affiliate of the influential American Federation of Teachers.
Thanks to his zeal for expanding government power, Holder suffered a record number of unanimous defeats at the Supreme Court. “In the last three [Supreme Court] terms alone,” notes Cato's Ilya Shapiro, “the government has suffered 13 such defeats — a rate double President Clinton’s and triple President Bush’s — in areas of law ranging from criminal procedure to property rights to securities regulation to religious freedom.”
The reason is that Holder's Justice Department has sent so many ridiculous legal arguments before the justices. To name just a few, his solicitors general have gone to court with a straight face and maintained that presidents get to decide when the Senate is in recess. They have argued that the federal government can tell churches whom to hire as ministers, and that it could, in theory, ban political books from being printed in election years. They have argued that by merely withholding “final agency action” in an environmental case, federal bureaucrats can indefinitely block landowners from either using their land or appealing the government decision.
It is surely coincidence, but it seems fitting that Holder's resignation came two days after a federal judge ordered him to release, at long last, a list of the 15,000 documents he is needlessly withholding from Congress regarding Operation Fast and Furious under a dubious executive privilege claim. Holder has stonewalled congressional investigators for three years regarding the ill-conceived law enforcement operation that armed Mexican cartels, causing known deaths on both sides of the border.
In the process, he became the first sitting cabinet member in American history to be held in contempt of Congress. Let no one say he served without that distinction.
