President Obama’s supporters should hope Attorney General Eric Holder resigns. His embarrassing tenure has given Republicans a potent symbol of leftist extremism combined with comic incompetence. This nasty blend is symbolic of the entire administration, as shattered expectations of moderation and competence played a significant role in the midterm tsunami.
Some would certainly like to see the festering mess at the Justice Department continue through 2011. But I know firsthand how the resignation of an attorney general can help rejuvenate both the DOJ and the White House.
The problems with Holder’s tenure are so numerous it is hard to know where to start.
When Eric Holder visited the Voting Section at DOJ in March 2009, a circus followed, which I have written about here at PJM. The racialist Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King stood in front of Holder and the entire Voting Section and announced how every day she beams with pride “because two black men are running the country.” Had an announcement of this sort been made at a Winn-Dixie staff meeting during the Clinton administration, the very same Loretta King would have been engineering a lawsuit against the grocer.
Did Attorney General Holder reprimand Loretta King for her inappropriate racial comments? Or worse, would he defend her comments? Congress can ask him in oversight hearings, unless wiser Democrats decide it is time for Eric Holder to go before that.
Loretta King is the same incompetent partisan involved in dismissing the slam-dunk voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. King also once told another assembled section in the Civil Rights Division that she was a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. You’d never guess.
King’s blame has diminished over the last few months, however, as records have emerged through a Judicial Watch lawsuit. They prove top level presidential appointees at Justice were driving the New Black Panther dismissal, not career attorneys disagreeing with career attorneys — as we heard under oath. Even so, King — devout defender of the New Black Panther dismissal — couldn’t accept the notion that blacks could be defendants in a civil rights case, and still doesn’t.
Holder is a national security disaster. His policies make it more likely that Americans will suffer another devastating attack. Holder’s Justice Department has imposed higher evidentiary burdens on itself in terror matters than even the federal courts have required. Holder has also given a central role to State Department nuts like Harold Koh to formulate terror policy deep inside the Justice Department. From reading Miranda rights to battlefield captures in Afghanistan, to short-circuiting the interrogation of the underwear bomber in Detroit, Holder’s policies may be an electoral disaster for Democrats in 2012.
Yet another disaster on Holder’s watch was the enforcement of military voting rights in 2010. It became a comedy of incompetence. (PJM has extensively covered the mess, including here and here and here.) Justice bureaucrats responsible for protecting military voting rights failed to enforce the requirement that ballots be mailed out 45 days before the election because they disagreed with the congressional mandate. They believed that 30 days was enough time, and even if it wasn’t, ballots mailed late could simply be tallied after the election. Never mind that Congress explicitly rejected this solution.
The DOJ failed to sue states for weeks or months after non-compliance was discovered. PJM broke news of noncompliance in places the DOJ didn’t even know about. Most outrageous of all, the responsible bureaucrats think the criticism of their incompetence is unfair.
That's why we have taken to calling the DOJ the Department of JustUs. This is a national disgrace. Under that blindfold, lady Justice is crying.
