President Lameduck’s attorney general

President Obama announced this week that he plans to make a very important decision, but not until after the Nov. 4 election.

We’re not referring to the forthcoming executive order changing U.S. immigration policy without congressional input — although Obama has also promised to do that after the election, because the public doesn’t yet “understand what the facts are on immigration” as well as he thinks he does.

Nor are we referring to Obama’s more recent deferred promise to defy Congress by moving several Guantanamo terrorism detainees so that they can continue to be held indefinitely and without trial or charges in prisons within close proximity to millions of Americans.

No, in this case, Obama is putting off his decision on who will replace the retiring Eric Holder as Attorney General. And as in the other cases noted above, the delay is not encouraging.

When politicians conceal facts and defer important decisions until after voters have had their chance to weigh in, it is usually because they have something to hide from those same voters.

For example, when the Obama administration pressured the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security to delay until after the 2012 election its report on the Cartagena sex scandal involving the Secret Service and a member of the White House advance team — retaliating swiftly and harshly against investigators who objected to the interference — that was a case of them hiding something.

When Obama furtively signaled to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would have more “flexibility” to accommodate him after the 2012 election, it was not because he was saving it up as a pleasant surprise for Americans to enjoy at Christmas. It was because the Obama planned to adopt a posture that many Americans might have considered unwise toward an aggressive and hostile regime whose nature was already apparent and whose intentions have been made brutally apparent ever since. Obama had no intention of making those plans public before he had already secured himself a second term in the Oval Office.

Likewise, this year, Obama pushed the open enrollment period for purchasing insurance through his healthcare law until after the election. As a result, most people won’t know how much their rates are increasing under Obamacare until it is too late to punish the law’s supporters.

There is a clear and invidious pattern here: Obama holds back controversial decisions and damaging information until the formality of having the people decide is behind him.

By deferring his pick for Attorney General until the post-election lame duck Congress is seated, Obama is signaling an intention to make a controversial pick who might hurt his party politically if voters were informed. It might be because he intends to choose another ideologically extreme attorney general, such as Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, or because he wants to appoint the same White House lawyer involved in covering up the Cartagena fiasco.

Either way, it is not a good sign for democracy or for the public that Obama once again doesn’t trust them with the information they need to judge his actions in office.

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