There are all manner of principled reasons that someone—especially a Democratic senator—might oppose Alabama senator Jeff Sessions becoming the next attorney general. (Indeed, a number of prominent conservative voices have even wondered aloud about Sessions’s enthusiasm for civil asset forfeiture.)
But Senator Cory Booker, in a bit of grandstanding that suggests he’s a young man in a hurry to the White House, took it a step further. Despite a history of cordial relations with Sessions and working together to honor civil rights activists, Booker decided to break longstanding Senate tradition and testify against Sessions at his attorney general confirmation hearing. If you thought such an extraordinary move must have been dictated by extraordinary concerns, well, Booker was a big disappointment.
Indeed, Ramesh Ponnuru flags the choicest bit of Booker’s testimony yesterday against Sessions: “The next attorney general must bring hope and healing to this country, and this demands a more courageous empathy than Senator Sessions’ record demonstrates,” Booker said.
“Hope and healing”? It’s like Booker was on autopilot, started to say “hope and change,” and realized halfway through that wouldn’t quite work. Rest assured though, after Obama’s two attorneys general, much of America wants change. Dramatic change. Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress—a decision supported by 17 members of Booker’s (and Holder’s) own party—after he stonewalled the investigation of the ATF for giving Mexican drug cartels thousands of guns, leading to the death of an American border patrol agent.
Yesterday, the Justice Department inspector general launched a wide ranging inquiry into the Justice Department’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation under Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s tenure including specific actions showing that federal law enforcement actions acted in a manner that helped Clinton evade justice. Democrats want to blame Comey for Clinton’s loss, but there are plenty of reasons Hillary Clinton planned to keep Bill Clinton appointee Lynch in the job of attorney general had she won.
But what is it with Democrats and their bizarre expectation of transcendence from public officials? The job of the attorney general is to enforce the law, not to provide “hope and healing.” Similarly, California’s freshman senator, Kamala Harris, grilled CIA nominee, Rep. Mike Pompeo, about… climate change? At a time when domestic terror attacks are rising, the Middle East is a giant abattoir, and Russia and China are running roughshod over American interests, the CIA should be focused on far more imminent and likely apocalypses.
