U.S. Attorney General Holder Must Resign or Be Removed from Office

     In my January of 2009 post, Hold the Line on Holder, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2009/01/hold-line-on-holder.html, I had singled out Eric Holder as the one Cabinet appointment by United States President Barak Obama that conservatives should have resisted. Holder’s record as Attorney General validates my concern.

     Recently, Holder has come under fire because of Justice Department program called “Operation Fast and Furious.” Under the program, guns were provided to Mexican drug cartels ostensibly to track them, but really in order to make appear as if loose gun laws in American states are to blame for drug violence in Mexico. A U.S. Border Control agent was among the scores of people who were killed by the drug cartels using the guns. Questions have arisen about lack of proper tracking and retrieval of the guns, as well as deception by the Justice Department in order to avoid congressional oversight and even to disguise the program’s true purpose. Some critics have called for Holder’s resignation because of the Fast and Furious scandal. 

     The scandal over Fast and Furious may result in Holder’s resignation, firing or impeachment, but there also has been a pattern of radical policies implemented by the Attorney General on behalf of the Obama Administration. 

     Holder dropped charges of voter intimidation during the 2008 General Election against the New Black Panthers in Philadelphia. The armed Panthers were caught on film intimidating voters at a voting precinct. The Justice Department had won a judgment against the Panthers, but dropped the case. A career Justice Department prosecutor resigned in protest, claiming that political leadership of the Department under Attorney General Holder had expressed its policy of not prosecuting voter intimidation by blacks against whites, instead of enforcing the equal protection of the laws, as required by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Holder also declines to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, a bipartisan Clinton-era federal law that allows states the option to not recognize “gay marriages” in other states instead of being forced to recognize them. 

     The Attorney General’s implementation of policies reflect Obama’s failure to recognize the problem of terrorism as a facet of a war by militant Muslims against the United States, instead of as only a criminal problem. For example, the Holder attempted to conduct civilian trials for the September 11 conspirators and other terrorists who are war criminals, not common criminals. Indeed, he has not only charged terrorists with crimes and had them read their right to remain silent instead of interrogating them sufficiently. Holder has weakened American security by softening interrogations of terrorists and by threatening to prosecute criminally those Americans who harshly interrogated terrorists in order to prevent terrorist attacks against innocent American civilians. The Attorney General’s record on the War on Terrorism, which reflects a widespread left-wing view within the Obama Administration, has been the most significant blemish on Obama’s otherwise adequate record on the war. But even this one blemish is a risk too great to abide. 

     For all these reasons, the tenure of Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General must soon come to an end. We conservatives should continue to expose the radical left-wing policies of Holder and other Obama Administration officials and hold them accountable.