If membership in Barack Obama’s Cabinet was based on merit, Thursday’s announcement of the impending departure of Attorney General Eric Holder would have come a lot sooner. Instead, Mr. Holder outlasted all but two of Mr. Obama’s original Cabinet secretaries (the exceptions being Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack).
If membership in Barack Obama’s Cabinet was based on merit, Thursday’s announcement of the impending departure of Attorney General Eric Holder would have come a lot sooner. Instead, Mr. Holder outlasted all but two of Mr. Obama’s original Cabinet secretaries (the exceptions being Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack).
The length of the attorney general’s tenure — which will likely end up as the second-longest of the past century, behind only Janet Reno’s nearly eight years under Bill Clinton — makes its conclusion that much more merciful.
The one and only high point of Mr. Holder’s tenure came at the time of his confirmation, when he became the first African American in the nation’s history to serve as the country’s highest-ranking law enforcement official. While we believe that high office should be awarded purely on the merits, with no reference to demographic considerations, it is still surely a good thing anytime such a milestone is reached.
That said, it became clear early in Mr. Holder’s tenure that race was to be one of the dominant themes of his tenure — and that it was a topic that would not be approached in the spirit of reconciliation that Barack Obama had offered on the campaign trail.
Indeed, the new administration had been in Washington for less than a month before Mr. Holder pronounced America “a nation of cowards” on racial matters. Subsequent actions — whether his refusal to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party who intimidated voters in Philadelphia; his repeated attempts to frame voter identification laws and challenges to the Voting Rights Act as efforts to suppress African American voters; or his public sympathizing with the family of Michael Brown while the teen’s shooting death was still under federal investigation — all demonstrated a tendency toward partisanship rather than the dispassionate mindset that his job required.
Earlier this year, Mr. Holder said, “If you want to call me an activist attorney general, I will proudly accept that label.” Anyone with a decent respect for the rule of law would understand that label is an oxymoron.
The cases in which Mr. Holder seemed more interested in defending the White House than actually pursuing justice are almost too numerous to count. They include the Fast and Furious gun-running operation, the Justice Department’s surveillance of American journalists, and the Internal Revenue Service scandal — the last of which left Mr. Holder the first sitting attorney general to be held in contempt by Congress.
As the Senate considers his replacement, they ought to seek an explicit refutation of that style. The attorney general’s first loyalty ought to be to the rule of law, not to the president who appointed him. It is the inability to grasp that distinction that will forever mark Mr. Holder’s tenure as a failure.
— From the Orange County Register