Before the November election, Eric Holder was among the prominent Democrats who denounced the Bush administration’s “politicization” of the Justice Department. Now that he is Attorney General, the same Holder is blatantly politicizing the place. The latest evidence of his hypocrisy appeared Wednesday on the front page of The Washington Post, which reported that Holder overrode his own appointees at Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) on the matter of congressional representation for the District of Columbia.
As far back as the early 1960s under Bobby Kennedy, the Justice Department consistently has held that only a constitutional amendment could provide the District (as currently constituted) with a U.S. House member with full voting privileges. When Holder’s new OLC reached the same conclusion, though, Holder cherry-picked politically correct lawyers from the solicitor general’s office to give him a more supportive opinion consistent with President Barack Obama’s political aims. In doing so, Holder broke his confirmation pledge to abide by the OLC’s findings as the “best opinions of probably the best lawyers in the department…. It will not be a political process.”
This comes on the heels of a little-noticed event held Tuesday at the Great Hall of Justice’s Robert F. Kennedy Building. At what was labeled a “Women’s History Month Program,” Justice sponsored a speech by Donna Brazile, the veteran Democratic political operative who managed former Vice-President Al Gore’s unsuccessful 1980 bid for the Oval Office. The flyer advertising the speech noted that “Supervisors are encouraged to grant official time to employees to attend this event.” In other words, taxpayers footed the bill for Justice employees to stop working and listen to a speech by somebody self-described as a “veteran Democratic political strategist.” How can that not be “politicization?”
To indicate Brazile’s current interests, the most recent “News/Event” posted Wednesday on her web site was an essay by one Michelle J. Nealy that began thusly: “The Black Power movement is not a vestige of the past, but a living didactical legacy that is as relevant now in the Obama era as it has ever been….” Perhaps this is what Holder meant in his own branding of Americans as “a nation of cowards” on racial issues. In that Feb. 18 speech to DoJ workers, Holder said his department “must – and will – lead the nation to the ‘new birth of freedom’ so long ago promised.” Holder apparently doesn’t understand that his job is to uphold the law, not to use the office he holds for political crusades to change the law, especially when doing so requires ignoring the best advice of “probably the best lawyers in the department.”
