by Charlie Spiering • Breitbart
President Obama will no longer be able to keep secret the documents related to the botched gun walking operation in Mexico in “Operation Fast and Furious,” thanks to a ruling from a federal judge.
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected Obama’s claim of executive privilege, according to Politico – which was invoked to protect Attorney General Eric Holder from the truth about the operation. Jackson was nominated for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia by Obama.
This is the latest step in the ongoing fight for details of the operation that poisoned the relationship between Holder and members of Congress who voted to hold the former Attorney General in contempt of Congress.
But the fight is not over, as the Obama administration could appeal the ruling to a higher court.
by Gregg Jarrett • Fox News
Eric Holder is now the former attorney general of the United States. Which invites the question: what will his legacy be as America’s top law enforcement officer?
I suspect history will find our eighty-second attorney general more reviled than revered.
When he looked in the mirror, Holder seemed to see the visage of Bobby Kennedy –a champion of civil rights. His detractors, and there were many, saw someone who more closely resembled John Mitchell, Nixon’s political hatchet man who, as attorney general, did his boss’s bidding, covered it up and went to prison. Continue reading
By Katie Pavlich • The Hill
On Wednesday, Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, will raise her right hand in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and swear to tell the whole truth to lawmakers during her nomination hearing for attorney general of the United States.
Following in the footsteps of Attorney General Eric Holder, Lynch will be forced to tackle a series of complicated, corrupt and highly controversial topics when she takes her seat on Capitol Hill. She will have to make her own case about how to clean up the highly politicized, and often toxic, Department of Justice.
Now that Republicans are in charge of the Senate, Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has the subpoena power he needs to dig deeper into scandals ignored by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the previous Democratic leadership — and you can bet he’s planning on getting answers to unanswered questions. Continue reading
by The Oklahoman Editorial Board
When they go to the polls in a few weeks, voters in many states, including Oklahoma, will be asked to show some form of identification. This is no thanks to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who made it his mission during six years on the job to undo a number of voter ID laws.
Holder, who is stepping aside soon, went so far as to compare voter ID laws to bygone Jim Crow-inspired laws designed to tamp down minority participation. The comparisons were beyond ridiculous, particularly given that in state after state, voter ID laws have withstood legal challenges from liberal interests. Continue reading
The Obama administration has tarnished nearly every major federal agency.
by Victor Davis Hanson • National Review
Many have described the Obama departure from the 70-year-old bipartisan postwar foreign policy of the United States as reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s failed 1977–81 tenure. There is certainly the same messianic sense of self, the same naïveté, and the same boasts of changing the nature of America, as each of these presidents was defining himself as against supposedly unpopular predecessors. But the proper Obama comparison is not Carter, but rather Warren G. Harding. By that I mean not that Obama’s scandals have matched Harding’s, but rather that by any fair standard they have now far exceeded them and done far more lasting damage — and without Obama’s offering achievements commensurate with those that occasionally characterized Harding’s brief, failed presidency.
The lasting legacy of Obama will be that he has largely discredited the idea of big government, of which he was so passionate an advocate. Almost every major agency of the federal government, many of them with a hallowed tradition of bipartisan competence, have now been rendered either dysfunctional or politicized — or both — largely because of politically driven appointments of unqualified people, or ideological agendas that were incompatible with the agency’s mission.
The list of scandals is quite staggering. In aggregate, it makes Harding’s Teapot Dome mess seem minor in comparison. Continue reading
The attorney general battled against state voter-ID laws, despite all evidence of their fairness and popularity. What will his successor do?
by Edwin Meese III and J. Kenneth Blackwell • Wall Street Journal
Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced his resignation on Thursday, leaves a dismal legacy at the Justice Department, but one of his legal innovations was especially pernicious: the demonizing of state attempts to ensure honest elections.
As a former U.S. attorney general under President Reagan, and a former Ohio secretary of state, we would like to say something that might strike some as obvious: Those who oppose photo voter-ID laws and other election-integrity reforms are intent on making it easier to commit vote fraud.
That conclusion is inescapable, given the well-established evidence that voter-ID laws don’t disenfranchise minorities or reduce minority voting, and in many instances enhance it, despite claims to the contrary by Mr. Holder and his allies. As more states adopt such laws, the left has railed against them with increasing fury, even invoking the specter of the Jim Crow era to describe electoral safeguards common to most nations, including in the Third World. Continue reading
The president’s selective statistics are red meat to supporters, but still bogus.
by Robert D. Popper
The Obama administration has been ramping up its rhetoric about the evil of voter identification as part of the run-up to the midterm elections. In January, Attorney General Eric Holder told MSNBC that voter fraud “simply does not exist to the extent that would warrant” voter ID laws, adding that many who favor such measures do so in order to “depress the vote.” Vice President Joe Biden claimed in February that new voter ID laws in North Carolina, Alabama and Texas were motivated by “hatred” and “zealotry.”
In an April 11 speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, President Obama recited statistics purporting to show that voter fraud was extremely rare. The “real voter fraud,” he said, “is people who try to deny our rights by making bogus arguments about voter fraud.” Continue reading
by Kathleen Parker
One approaches the race fray with trepidation, but here we go, tippy-toe.
The race cards have been flying so fast and furious lately, one can hardly tell the kings from the queens.
Leading the weird lately has been Democratic Alabama state Rep. Alvin Holmes, who called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina “Uncle Toms.” Holmes, who also has said that it’s fine by him if men want to marry mules and, while we’re exorcising demons, that white people are only pro-life until their daughter gets pregnant by a black man.
When Mark Childress wrote “Crazy in Alabama,” he wasn’t just whistling Dixie! Continue reading