Holder arrogance to be tested in Congress
Image via WikipediaWhen the Obama administration wakes up next month to a divided capital, no cabinet member will be facing a more miserable prospect of oversight hearings and subpoenas than Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.Holder seems to have a lot of confidence in his bad policiy positions. I think that will ultimately cause him a problem he can no longer ignore. He has a civil rights division that is not interested in protecting whites according to the statements of its leaders.
Mr. Holder is a particularly juicy target because he presides over issues that have served as recurrent fodder for political controversy — including using the criminal justice system for terrorism cases, and federal enforcement of civil-rights and immigration laws.
More than most administration officials, he has served as a proxy for Republican attacks on what they see as President Obama’s left-leaning agenda. At least two 2012 possible Republican presidential hopefuls have already called for Mr. Holder’s resignation.
“It’s likely to be a difficult year,” said Bruce Buchanan, a political science professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who said Mr. Holder’s coming fights are likely to “attract press attention in a way that steps on other messages the Obama administration would like to have front and center.”
Sitting in a conference room adjacent to his office this month, Mr. Holder pointed out that he had been deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, when both chambers of Congress were under Republican control and were conducting aggressive oversight of the Justice Department.
“You’ve got to understand that I cut my teeth in the leadership of this department dealing with the situation we’re about to encounter,” he said.
He defended himself in advance on some hot-button issues, and he seemed to hint at some steps in the realm of counterterrorism policies that might hearten his conservative critics in Congress but could draw criticism on the left. He also laid out what amounts to an agenda for the coming year, from continuing to restore the “traditional mission” of the department — law enforcement work put on the back burner after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — to national security matters, including a fresh push to overhaul an important surveillance law.
As Mr. Holder takes up such work, the incoming House chairmen most likely to play leading roles in Justice Department oversight are Representatives Lamar Smith of Texas, the new head of the Judiciary Committee, and Darrell Issa of California, who will lead the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Both declined to be interviewed, but Mr. Smith said in a statement, “I am committed to fair and reasonable oversight of the Justice Department and to ensuring openness and transparency of our federal law enforcement agencies.”
Mr. Holder said that he did not know Mr. Issa well, but that he had known Mr. Smith for years. The two recently had lunch, and Mr. Holder said he believed they could work together.
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Holder foolishly turned down guilty pleas by the 9-11 perps in military commissions so he could run show trials in New York. That bad decision has backfired on him in several ways, yet he and the Obama administration still do not comprehend the errors of the lawfare strategy they have embraced.
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