WhiteHousenowleaningonEricHolderto

White House now leaning on Eric Holder to play the role of racial healer?

posted at 9:21 am on August 20, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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In 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder said that America was a “nation of cowards” when it came to the issue of race. He stood by that claim as recently as January when asked if the events of the intervening years had changed his opinion. This is a perfectly defensible position to hold, but one gets the impression that Holder is not scolding the nation for being afraid to discuss racial issues honestly but for being unwilling to embrace his preconceived conclusions on race.

On multiple occasions this year alone, the Attorney General of the United States has implied or stated outright that those who are politically opposed to both him and President Barack Obama are motivated by racial animus.

In April, delivering a speech to the annual convention of activist/cable news host Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, the U.S. Attorney General denounced the “unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly, and divisive” rhetoric directed at Obama by Republicans. He further suggested that racism motivated some GOP members of the U.S. House of Representatives who questioned him during a committee hearing with particular vigor.

“Look at the way the attorney general of the United States was treated yesterday by a House committee,” Holder remarked. “Had nothing to do with me, what attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?”

In May, Holder echoed the claims of MSNBC’s “dog whistle” detectors, who derive their job security by being able to decode the veiled racism in words like “apartment” and “golf,” when he said that subtle – nearly undetectable – racism is a greater scourge than overt discrimination. In other words, the kinds of civil rights violations which the Attorney General is empowered to prosecute are of less relevance to America’s minorities than are the coded messages which are inexplicably only decipherable for the audience these Windtalker racists supposedly trying to avoid alerting.

“There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me [and] directed at the president,” Holder said on ABC’s This Week in June when asked about Republican opposition to a Democratic administration. “You know, people talking about taking their country back. … There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there’s a racial animus.”

This recent history is perhaps why the White House’s determination that Holder is best suited to play the role of racial healer is especially vexing.

“After years of causing angst for White House political aides by delving into issues of race, Attorney General Eric Holder is heading to Ferguson, Missouri, as President Barack Obama’s top emissary,” CNN’s Evan Perez reported.

Reports have indicated that the White House no longer believes Barack Obama can heal racial divides when tense conflicts like those ongoing in Ferguson erupt. In fact, some administration officials reportedly believe that, at this stage of his presidency, Obama only exacerbates tensions. And perhaps Holder maintains a level of credibility among African-Americans that few others in this administration enjoy. That could certainly be an asset in his efforts to defuse the tensions in Missouri.

In an op-ed published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Wednesday, Holder wrote of trust lost, of the federal government’s obligation to this disgruntled community, and of the reforms necessary to forge a new path toward comity. He made no mention of the racial tensions which have characterized these last two weeks of unrest, and that is only likely to further enrage this administration’s supporters.

As Vox’s Ezra Klein noted, Obama’s supporters were not happy with the president’s failure to address the issue of race head-on when he spoke about Ferguson on Monday. “The president’s tone was clinical. His delivery was understated,” Klein wrote. “He seemed to be trying to avoid headlines.”

Based on Obama’s supporters’ dissatisfaction with the president’s approach to the situation in Ferguson, maybe Holder was the perfect figure to send to the area today.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Eric Holder, ferguson, race

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EricHolder,America’schieflawenforcementofficial,tries

Eric Holder, America’s chief law enforcement official, tries to spark racial hatred

posted at 3:21 pm on July 14, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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The Obama administration long ago cultivated a sense among its defenders that lingering American racism inspires most of its critics, but it was Obama’s supporters in the press who elevated the practice of accusing conservatives of racial animus to farcical virtuosity.

It was Obama’s boosters in the liberal blogosphere, many of whom found microphones for their agitation on networks like MSNBC, who invented the art of detecting “dog whistle” racism. For those unfamiliar, this is the ability to decode supposed appeals to racial solidarity that only a professional can ascertain. While these coded claims are rarely perceived by their alleged targets, they are easily identified by our modern augurs.

The instinct among Obama supporters to invent imagined racism and denounce it with a fervor equal to that of the inquisitors evolved into parody during the 2012 election. Words like “golf,” “apartment”, “Chicago,” and “urban” became synonyms for African-Americasn and for President Obama, thus rendering any subject of discussion including those words base and scornful.

As is the carnival barker’s wont, the sequel to this act had to be even grander, more spectacular than the last. So words like “PGA tour,” “angry,” “kitchen cabinet,” and “IRS” were added to the mix of words which only a professional “dog whistle” detector could assess to be signals designed to activate imagined white supremacist sleeper cells.

It was former Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Karen Finney who insisted that “welfare” must join the ranks of banned words with a racially tinged history. “Study after study has shown, very recently even, that Americans – we tend to associate welfare programs with black people,” Finney said at the time. “So, if you didn’t know that, then shame on you. If you did know that, then shame on you.”

“What the Republicans are doing is diabolically clever,” practiced Washington Post racism decoder Jonathan Capehart agreed. “They are, I believe, playing subliminally to racial fears and racial resentments.”

In a display which resulted in his firing, former Politico reporter Joe Williams and a contributor with NBC’s The Grio insisted that conservative commentators who dare mention the name of Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, were the modern equivalent of the Klan. “It’s a claxon. It’s an air raid siren. It’s a call to arms,” Williams insisted.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews outdid the lot when he suggested the fact that Obama even drew an opponent in 2012 was a disturbing indication of the country’s, and Mitt Romney’s, racial anxiety.

The reelection of the president did not quiet the insistence that racism exists today in forms undetectable to those who are not trained mediums, but liberals have made such a joke of this practice that only a narrow audience of true believers still enjoy the performance.

A recent Pew Research Center poll revealed that only 27 percent of the public believes racial discrimination is the “main reason why blacks can’t get ahead.” That figure is inflated by the fact that 80 percent of “solid liberals” agreed with this assertion – 49 points greater than any other group within the Democratic coalition.

What’s more is that this playact is losing its novelty. When public figures make unquestionably racially tinged statements, the usual cast of characters who are our trained racism detectors display a transparent fear for their livelihoods.

In the wake of racially insensitive comments made by former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling and Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, Capehart, one of the most accomplished “dog whistle” decoders, warned that calling out this manner of overt, obvious racial rhetoric was less valuable than the work he does.

“The harder reaction to have and the harder conversation to have is with our friends, and co-workers, and strangers, frankly, about all of the little — the small, the more nuanced ways racism rears its ugly head,” he added, résumé in hand.

It is in this light that recent comments made by Attorney General Eric Holder, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, should be viewed. Holder, who recently implied in a speech before an audience of African-American supporters that Republicans in Congress treated him as harshly as they would any other official in the Obama administration because of his skin color, fanned the flames of racial hatred again in a recent interview with ABC News.

Asked about a statement he made years ago when he said America was a “nation of cowards” on the issue of race, Holder defended his remarks. “I think we are still a nation that is too afraid to confront racial issues,” he said.

The attorney general lamented that it is rare to witness engagement “across the color line [to] talk about racial issues.” He did little to acknowledge his own role in that condition, exemplified by an comment he made minutes before in which he implied that some who oppose him and the president are racists.

“There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me [and] directed at the president,” Holder told ABC. “You know, people talking about taking their country back. I can’t look into people’s hearts, look into people’s minds, but it seems to me that this president has been treated differently than others… There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there’s a racial animus.”

For most, this is a joke. The meme that the bipartisan notion of “taking the country back” is somehow racist was long ago debunked. As the brief history lesson above demonstrates, however, no one is listening to this nonsense beyond the cult of true believers. Those for who racism is a religion – ubiquitous and unfalsifiable – nod in agreement at Holder’s self-aggrandizement. All others roll their eyes.

It is natural and right to be incensed over the attorney general’s statement here, but a 30,000 foot view suggests there is even more reason to take heart in his remarks. Only those liberals Democrats the party desperately needs to turn out in the fall are inspired by this rhetoric; that desperate need is met with increasingly desperate tactics. A glance at the polls suggests it will not be successful.

American comity and continuously improving race relations are stronger than one presidency, no matter how committed it is to tearing the country apart.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Eric Holder, MSNBC, racism

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DepartmentofJusticeundeterredinappealingonbehalf

Department of Justice undeterred in appealing on behalf of Operation Choke Point

posted at 9:21 pm on June 3, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

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As Ed noted last week in regard to the Obama Justice Department’s ultra-bizarre and super-shady Operation Choke Point — an ATF scheme in which the feds tried to cut off what they deemed to be, ahem, objectionable enterprises’ access to banking services — it sure seems like a really great way to set up a system that will eventually ripen with corruption and abuse. The fact that two federal judges have recently recognized it as such, however, is not a deterrent for the ATF:

Two federal judges have ruled that widely used sting operations designed to ensnare suspects with the promise of a huge payday for robbing an imaginary drug stash house are so “outrageous” that they are also unconstitutional. One judge said the charges were so unfair that he threw them out after three suspects already pleaded guilty.

Each of the men admitted to charges that would put them in prison for seven years or more. But instead of sending them there, U.S. District Court Judge Manuel Real declared that federal agents had “created the fictitious crime from whole cloth” and that their conduct was unconstitutional. Then he dismissed the charges and ordered that all three be set free. …

Another judge there, Otis Wright, dismissed a similar case in March, concluding in a scathing order that a “reverse-sting operation like this one transcends the bounds of due process and makes the Government the oppressor of its people.”

The Justice Department has appealed both decisions.

Nor, I imagine, will the Justice Department be deterred by the House vote last week to stop all federal funding for Operation Choke Point, nor by the House Oversight Committee’s official complaints that the whole thing is pretty much a sham:

The Justice Department’s “Operation Choke Point” is so flagrantly illegal it cannot continue in any form under the law, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Charman Darrell Issa’s staff said in a new report, setting up a constitutional confrontation between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.

“In light of the Department’s obligation to act within the bounds of the law, and its avowed commitment not to ‘discourage or inhibit’ the lawful conduct of honest merchants, it is necessary to disavow and dismantle Operation Choke Point,” the report said. …

DOJ has said the program is targeted at fraud, but the oversight committee report provided evidence the program was “was created by the Justice Department to ‘choke out’ companies the Administration considers a ‘high risk’ or otherwise objectionable, despite the fact that they are legal businesses.”

I might be a little more inclined to give the Justice Department the benefit of the doubt on this one if they didn’t already have another bizarre, completely ineffective, and ultimately deadly operation targeting perfectly legal gun shops under their belt. As it stands, I’m not.

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Obama:AfterOklahoma’sbotchedexecution,I’maskingEric

Obama: After Oklahoma’s botched execution, I’m asking Eric Holder to review the death penalty

posted at 2:41 pm on May 2, 2014 by Allahpundit

Is this a real review, or one of those buy-some-time-until-people-forget-about-it “reviews” a la Holder weighing whether to charge George Zimmerman with a federal crime after he was acquitted in Florida? Given the recent dip in support for the death penalty has fallen, Democrats might feel safe-ish pushing for a moratorium on capital punishment in federal cases circa late 2015 or early 2016, to goose their base a little before the next vote. A studiously fair ‘n balanced review by Eric Holder could be just the pretext they need.

Calling a botched state killing in Oklahoma “deeply troubling,” President Barack Obama said Friday the federal government would review death penalty procedures around the country.

Obama said he’s asked Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct an analysis of how death row criminals are killed after an execution attempt in Oklahoma left an accused murderer writhing and convulsing following a lethal injection…

“Racial bias. Uneven application of the death penalty. Situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence – all these I think do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied,” he said.

This retort on Twitter caught my attention:

President who sponsored infanticide legislation is deeply troubled by the botched execution of a rapist murderer.

— S.M44 (@redsteeze) May 2, 2014

President who has no opinion on Kermit Gosnell has opinions on botched executions.

— S.M44 (@redsteeze) May 2, 2014

Actually, O didn’t say that he had no opinion on Gosnell last year, he said that he couldn’t comment while the trial was active. Well, the trial’s not active anymore. Has anyone followed up with him on that subject since then? If Holder’s keen on studying how death is meted out in America, the Gosnell slaughterhouse is a fine starting point for an inquiry into the abortion side of it. But that’d be a buy-some-time-until-people-forget-about-it “review” if ever there was one.

Tags: capital punishment, death penalty, doj, Eric Holder, lockett, obama, Oklahoma

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Report:HoldercommittedtostayingonasAttorney

Report: Holder committed to staying on as Attorney General through the midterms

posted at 12:41 pm on April 25, 2014 by Allahpundit

Through the midterms — but not necessarily through the end of the year.

Why would Democrats want people to know that Holder won’t be stepping down before voters go to the polls? Hmmmm.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to stay in his job through the fall midterm elections but he will not commit beyond the end of the year, according to Justice Department officials familiar with his plans…

A medical scare in February added to the sense that Holder’s departure might be imminent. During a staff meeting, he felt faint and was taken by ambulance to a hospital where he was treated for an elevated heart rate. Holder told close friends that it was “spooky” and that he felt like it was a “sign” that he should spend more time with his family.

But Justice Department officials and others close to Holder, 63, said that several initiatives he has cared about deeply for a long time are underway, and that he is not in a hurry to leave…

Holder has indicated that he does not want to remain attorney general through President Obama’s second term.

He told the New Yorker in February that he planned on staying “well into 2014,” which the magazine took as a hint that he’d be gone before New Year’s. (The DOJ disputed that.) The reason Dems might want him out sooner rather than later is obvious: If/when they lose the Senate, confirming new cabinet members becomes much harder — and hardest of all will be confirming someone to replace the GOP’s least favorite administration official. If he quits now, Reid can ram someone new through without difficulty. That’s also why some lefties are eager for Ginsburg and Breyer to step down from the Supreme Court this summer.

On the other hand, if Holder quits now, it’ll hand the GOP a platform to revisit his various fark-ups right in the middle of a congressional campaign — Fast & Furious, spying on the press, refusing to turn over documents, the contempt charge in the House, and so forth. It’ll also be seen by Democratic incumbents as a sign that the White House really does think the Senate’s going to fall in November. That’s a bad message to send when O’s busy trying to convince them to run on ObamaCare, and it’s unduly pessimistic given that Obama’s job approval has rebounded (a little) and at least one statistical model gives Democrats a 51 percent chance of holding the Senate. So Holder, it seems, is going to compromise on the timeline. To show confidence that the party will hold onto at least 50 seats this fall, he’s postponing his resignation until after the vote. But maybe not long after the vote — if he resigned the day after election day, I suppose it’s possible that Reid could try to confirm a replacement during the lame-duck session. Michael Mukasey, for instance, was confirmed as AG less than two months after he was nominated by Bush. Would Reid be willing to keep the Senate in session late into December, though? Could he do it even if he wanted to given inevitable attempts by the GOP to delay?

As for replacements, Deval Patrick’s name has been mentioned for years. His term as governor of Massachusetts ends at the end of this year and he’s not running for reelection so there’s no dilemma about him quitting one high-profile job to take another. If he’s the pick, that might also help explain why the White House is in no rush to push Holder out. Patrick has prior DOJ experience as the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and he’s the twice-elected first black chief executive of one of the original 13 states; O might figure, probably rightly, that there won’t be 51 votes to oppose someone with that background even in a GOP-controlled Senate. Another possibility if it’s not Patrick is Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (a.k.a. Manhattan) who’s known for prosecuting insider-trading cases. O might dare the GOP to Bork him knowing that, if they do, Democrats can try to turn it into a “they’re defending Wall Street fatcats!” narrative. They’re constantly looking for income-inequality angles to run on; if they could turn a confirmation hearing into some sort of referendum on that, they’d be happy.

Tags: attorney general, department, Deval Patrick, doj, Eric Holder, justice, obama, resignation

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FederaljudgegivesLouisianathego-aheadinDOJ’s

Federal judge gives Louisiana the go-ahead in DOJ’s suit against school vouchers

posted at 2:01 pm on April 11, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

In 2012, Louisiana passed a statewide voucher program that would allow families living below 250% of the poverty line and with children attending ailing and failing public schools to instead send their children to a school of their choice — and it didn’t take too long for the Obama administration, what with their pro-union and anti-school choice proclivities, to try to put a stop to it with a permanent injunction while claiming that the program was “impeding the desegregation process.” …Which seems weird, since the overwhelming majority of the program’s beneficiaries have been poor minority students, but don’t even think about accusing the Obama administration of having “taken a position” on the matter:

Attorney General Eric Holder denied that the Justice Department “took a position” on a Louisiana school choice program that administration officials tried to restrict by asking a federal judge to issue a permanent injunction against issuing vouchers to students in some school districts.

Holder took a shot at Jindal and Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., during a congressional hearing Friday when Harris said that a Justice Department division had taken the voucher program to court. …

“We were seeking to get from the state of Louisiana information about their voucher program, [we] never ever took the position that we were against vouchers,” Holder told Harris. “It’s a talking point that Gov. Jindal and others — I guess you — think makes good political fodder, but it’s totally inconsistent with the facts.”

Actually, what’s “inconsistent with the facts” is pretending that trying to deny poor families the choice to remove their children from crummy, underperforming public schools is somehow a good or righteous idea, and on Tuesday, a federal judge basically ruled against the DOJ’s attempt at an injunction — although the court did grant some of the administration’s requests in terms of requiring the state to provide the DOJ with its data:

Starting this fall, Louisiana must provide the agency with timely information about the racial background of participating students each year so the Justice Department can monitor the program’s effect on school segregation, a federal judge ruled Tuesday night. …

“We welcome the court’s order, as it rejects the state’s bid to resist providing even the most basic information about how Louisiana’s voucher program will affect school desegregation efforts,” Attorney General Eric Holder said. “This ruling ought to resolve, once and for all, the unnecessary dispute initiated by the state’s refusal to provide data.” …

Under the court order, the state must send a spreadsheet with extensive information on each voucher applicant, including name, address and race; the public school, if any, the child attended the previous year; and the private school he or she would like to attend with the voucher. If the state is planning to award the child a voucher, it must also provide the name of the private school he or she will attend.

The Justice Department may use the information in “federal school desegregation cases in Louisiana,” the judge ruled. That latitude could allow the DOJ to seek to challenge distribution of some vouchers if its lawyers determined that sending the students to private schools would disrupt federal efforts to keep the public schools integrated.

Holder has been perturbed with Jindal for daring to question the administration’s motives in seeking the information, although with this administration’s record, how could anyone not be suspicious of their motives? A.k.a, collecting this data to later make some trumped-up case against the program again? Politico describes this as the DOJ having “prevailed — at least in part,” but Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal also said that the decision is a “win for children and parents” and that he’s satisfied that the ruling won’t obstruct the program, at least for now:

Today, U.S. District Court Judge Ivan Lemelle issued an order in the U.S. Department of Justice suit against the Louisiana School Choice Scholarship Program.  The Judge’s order is a win for children and parents in Louisiana who deserve access to an opportunity for a better education.  The order did not grant the request by President Obama’s Department of Justice for veto power over individual scholarship awards as the Justice Department had initially demanded.

Most importantly, the information sharing process ordered by the Judge should not impede the Scholarship Program.  However, the state will remain vigilant to ensure that the information sharing process will not be used by the Department of Justice as a means to impede the Scholarship Program through future litigation.

Governor Jindal said, “Today is great day for school choice and access to an opportunity for a better education for all Louisianians. I am pleased that the court rejected President Obama’s Justice Department’s attempt to establish a review period where bureaucrats in Washington would be able to reject scholarship awards solely because the child is not the ‘right’ skin color.

Tags: Bobby Jindal, Department of Justice, Eric Holder, Louisiana, school choice

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Holder:CanyoubelievethewaytheAttorney

Holder: Can you believe the way the Attorney General of the United States was treated yesterday?

posted at 7:21 pm on April 9, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

The almost textbook outrageously-outraged followup to Holder’s confrontation with Louie Gohmert during a House hearing on Tuesday. Ugh.

I am pleased to note that the last five years have been defined by significant strides and lasting reforms, even in the face, even in the face, of unprecedented, unwarranted ugly and divisive adversity. And if you don’t believe that, you look at the way — forget about me, forget about me — you look at the way the Attorney General of the United States was treated yesterday by a House Committee. It had nothing to do with me, forget about that. What Attorney General has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What President has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?

“It had nothing to do with me”? Well, actually, it one hundred percent had absolutely everything to do with you — and not because of the reason (hint: rhymes with “bassist”) you’re rather unsubtly implying, either. It might, however, have had something to do with the fact that your department within the Obama administration has ‘unprecedentedly‘ coordinated a scandalously failure of a deadly gunwalking operation that you’re still trying to downplay and dismiss while continuing to obfuscate the investigation thereof by refusing to hand over all of the relevant documentation. “What attorney general has ever been treated this way”? Wrong question, “buddy.”

Tags: contempt, Department of Justice, Eric Holder, Obama administration, racism

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Video:TreyGowdyvs.EricHolderonprosecutorial

Video: Trey Gowdy vs. Eric Holder on prosecutorial discretion and mandatory minimum sentences

posted at 8:01 pm on April 8, 2014 by Allahpundit

Via the Right Scoop, one last goodie from Holder’s huddle with the House this morning. To properly enjoy it, though, first you need to read this short but valuable primer from Ken White of Popehat published last August on the Holder memo that Gowdy’s describing. The Supreme Court ruled last year that if a federal prosecutor wants to slap a defendant with a mandatory minimum sentence, he needs to take care to include every fact that would trigger that sentence under federal law in the charging document. If you omit even a single relevant fact — such as, say, the amount of drugs that the defendant was caught with — then the judge is no longer bound by the mandatory minimum and can sentence the defendant to less time. That gives the prosecutor more discretion than he used to have. If, in his opinion, the defendant deserves some punishment but not as much as the mandatory minimum would require, he can simply omit the detail about the amount of drugs and thus empower the judge to hand down something more lenient. That’s what Holder’s memo is all about, instructing U.S. Attorneys not to specify the amount under certain circumstances (e.g., the defendant is nonviolent, not a member of a cartel, etc) so that the judge can ignore the mandatory minimum.

What makes this trickier than Obama’s usual invocations of executive power is that the DOJ does, in fact, have loads of discretion in deciding whom to charge and what to charge. All prosecutors do; Gowdy, a former prosecutor himself, happily concedes the point. This isn’t an example, a la the employer mandate, of O ignoring a statute in every instance simply because it’s politically inconvenient to him. It’s a determination that a particular class of defendants warrants a lighter sentence than federal guidelines require because of the unique circumstances of their cases. The U.S. Attorney could, in fact, refuse to charge those defendants at all even if there’s no doubt that they’re guilty. Gowdy’s fine with all that in principle. His problem is that federal law already allows for a few exceptions to mandatory minimum sentences (again, see Ken’s post) but Holder’s memo goes beyond it, essentially expanding the law unilaterally. The memo also specifically advocates withholding information from the court (the amount of drugs the defendant was caught with) in the name of securing a more just sentence. The core of this debate, then, is how much leeway a prosecutor should have in relaxing a democratically enacted criminal statute, even if his intentions are good and he’s trying to show mercy towards the defendant. Should he follow the law to the letter if it produces an unjust result or should he look the other way at it to obtain a more just one? Pick a side, because given the attention that mandatory minimums have gotten on both the left and the right lately, with Rand Paul and George Will emerging to criticize “sledgehammer justice,” the issue will only get hotter before 2016.

Tags: crime, discretion, drug, Eric Holder, mandatory minimum, sentence, Trey Gowdy

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Holder:Maybelawfulgunownersshouldhaveto

Holder: Maybe lawful gun owners should have to wear electronic bracelets to use them

posted at 8:41 am on April 8, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

How old am I? I’m old enough to remember when the only people on whom government wanted to put electronic bracelets were criminals. Attorney General Eric Holder testified yesterday on Capitol Hill about gun-safety programs promoted by the Department of Justice, which wants almost $400 million in the next budget for “common sense” regulations like electronic bracelets for firearms:

“I think that one of the things that we learned when we were trying to get passed those common sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I had a meeting with a group of technology people and we talked about how guns can be made more safe,” he said.

“By making them either through finger print identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or something that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon.”

“It’s those kinds of things that I think we want to try to explore so that we can make sure that people have the ability to enjoy their Second Amendment rights, but at the same time decreasing the misuse of weapons that lead to the kinds of things that we see on a daily basis,” Holder said.

First, the electronic bracelet concept has barely passed the theoretical stage, let alone made it into the commercial market. There is literally one pistol model being sold in one gun story in America which fits Holder’s “common sense” requirement. How exactly would that allow Americans to “enjoy their Second Amendment rights”?  Most gun owners — and there are over 60 million of them — handle and store their weapons safely. More people get murdered each year by body parts than by rifles, for instance, which had been the focus of gun-control efforts over the last sixteen months.

Drunk drivers kill nearly twice as many people each year as all firearms, and that figure may be seriously underestimated. Driving is already a government-regulated activity, so why not focus on installing breathalyzers in autos? Because when people need to drive, they don’t want a failing breathalyzer unit to keep their car from starting, and since most car owners don’t drink and drive in the first place, they don’t want to be treated like a criminal just to exercise their privilege of driving on public roads. Why should law-abiding citizens have to deal with the same kind of system malfunction at the precise moment they need a firearm to defend themselves or their families?

“Common sense” would be to leave law-abiding citizens alone. Of course, “common sense” would also be to not traffic rifles to drug cartels across the border into Mexico without any way to track them or retrieve them, so we know what role “common sense” plays in Eric Holder’s DoJ.

Tags: Eric Holder, gun control, Operation Fast and Furious

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Killingtheruleoflawsoftlyonimmigration

Killing the rule of law softly on immigration

posted at 4:31 pm on March 29, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

At the Corner, Mark Krikorian catches John Sandweg (previously of Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the act of putting forward proposals which would effectively eliminate his own former job.

Sandweg, a criminal defense attorney and Arizona crony of Janet Napolitano, wrote in relation to President Obama’s directive that ICE reexamine enforcement policies with an eye toward making them more “humane.” To that end, he says ICE “should eliminate ‘non-criminal re-entrants and immigration fugitives’ as a priority category for deportation.”

What that means is that people who have been formally deported and then sneak back in should be exempted from further attempts at removing them, even though re-entry after deportation is a felony. Also, he wants to exempt from deportation the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who have been ordered deported but ignored the order and simply absconded. He says, in the obligatory “to be sure” paragraph, “To be sure, those who repeatedly cross our borders illegally or abscond from the immigration court bear culpability” — but if they’re exempt from being taken into custody and removed from the country, what does that culpability mean? It’s not like they’re going to be prosecuted, even though reentry after deportation and absconding from court are both criminal offenses.

He’s not just blue-skying this idea; it’s clearly the next step being considered in the administration’s unilateral amnesty push. It wouldn’t confer legal status on any illegal aliens (unlike the president’s illegal DACA/DREAM amnesty) but would solidify the status of immigration violations as secondary offenses. An example of a secondary offense is not wearing your seatbelt (in many states, anyway) — the police can’t stop you just for that, but if they stop you for, say, speeding, and find you’re also not wearing your seatbelt, they can ticket you for that as well.

Sandweg’s editorial may be found here.

This is yet another layer of the onion which makes any rational discussion of immigration policy essentially futile when attempting to deal with the pro-amnesty crowd. More than a year ago, I raised the question of whether the Democrats and their pro-amnesty allies would be willing to settle the issue once and for all as to whether or not illegal immigration was a crime. It seemed to me that until you could answer that fundamental question, there was really no path forward to discuss anything else. Clearly, I was mistaken.

Sandweg highlight’s something which is already going on to some extent in the Justice Department and could clearly be taken much further. If you can’t gain any ground in getting the Legislative branch to decriminalize entry by illegal aliens, apparently you can just leave the current laws on the books but fail to enforce them. Or, on a related note, treat the crime as such an afterthought that there is no longer any disincentive to violating the law.

That leads us to the larger question – one which has been debated over a number of presidencies. At what point does a government divided into three ostensibly equal branches break down in effectiveness if they refuse to play their part in the overall contract? What does the Supreme Court do if it issues a ruling but can find no strong arm to enforce its decision? What recourse does the Legislative branch have if the duly elected members pass laws, but the judicial wing of the Executive fails to hold violators to account? It seems that this particular dodge exposes the reality that the White House has much stronger cards to play if the three branches come into conflict.

We’ll close with one of Krikorian’s observations on the subject.

This administration is engaged in executive nullification on a scale that threatens the constitutional order. Rather than trying to bamboozle voters into accepting an amnesty, the Republican leadership should be devoting itself to soberly and calmly making the case to the public that this administration is setting precedents that our children will come to regret.

And probably sooner rather than later.

Tags: Barack Obama, Eric Holder, illegal immigration, immigration reform, rule of law

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NYTreportercallsObamaWHthe“greatestenemy

NYT reporter calls Obama WH the “greatest enemy of press freedom”

posted at 10:41 am on March 25, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Thus testifies James Risen, the New York Times reporter reviled by the Bush administration for his probes and exposés of highly-classified government efforts to curtail terrorism. Risen may have had his issues with the Bush White House over his scoops and his sources, but they apparently pale in comparison to what he’s experiencing under Bush’s successor. Speaking to a symposium on press freedom, Risen minced no words in describing the threat to journalists from the Barack Obama administration:

New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”

The administration’s aggressive prosecutions have created “a de facto Official Secrets Act,” Risen said, and the media has been “too timid” in responding.

Toobin appeared on a panel that followed, moderated by Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak, who announced that if he weren’t a paragon of journalistic detachment, he’d say “the persecution of James Risen is a scandal.” The attorney Laura Handman noted that the U.S. Department of Justice’s new guidelines for accessing journalists’ records carve out a big space for the government to decide what constitutes “ordinary newsgathering.”

The panel mentioned Risen and Fox journalist James Rosen, who an FBI agent suggested was a “co-conspirator” in another leak investigation.

It wasn’t just that an FBI agent “suggested” that Rosen was a co-conspirator in espionage. It’s that the allegation was presented as part of a probable-cause warrant to conduct surveillance on Rosen — a move that required the approval of Attorney General Eric Holder, who has dodged questions about how that warrant request got approved.

Jeffrey Toobin and Obama administration lawyer Robert Litt tried to justify the war on reporters:

Robert Litt, the administration’s top lawyer for the national intelligence community, agreed with that statement. At the same conference, he likened reporting on national security leaks to drunk driving, arguing that we ban the practice despite the fact that there isn’t always a victim.

“Not every drunk driver causes a fatal accident,” he explained, “but we ban drunk driving because it increases the risk of accidents. In the same way, we classify information because of the risk of harm, even if no harm actually can be shown in the end from any particular disclosure.”

That’s why we prosecute the leakers, though, and not the reporters. Reporters do not take an oath to protect classified material, although they should exercise a lot more caution and discretion than Risen did in several instances at the NYT. That’s a matter of ethics, not law. The leakers are the criminals in this case, with some limited exceptions for true whistleblowing actions.

No one argued that the Bush administration went easy on journalists. We heard plenty of complaints about crackdowns on leakers during those eight years, some of which were more than justified in both crackdowns and complaints about them. However, until Obama took office, the federal government wasn’t swearing out surveillance warrants on reporters by accusing them of conspiring to commit espionage. The hostility to press freedom comes from the same impulse that limits other freedoms — to control the people through misinformation and a lack of accountability, so as to expand power even further. It’s not just in the area of press freedom that this administration has become the greatest threat in a generation.

Tags: Barack Obama, Eric Holder, First Amendment, James Risen, james rosen, nyt, press

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MSNBC host: There are studies that show you are “literally” more likely to be beamed up by a UFO than find a case of voter fraud

MSNBChost:Therearestudiesthatshowyou

Federaljudge:Yes,ArizonaandKansascanrequire

Federal judge: Yes, Arizona and Kansas can require voters to prove their citizenship

posted at 8:01 pm on March 19, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Under the oh so august leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder, the Obama administration has been doing their very best to thwart various states in their individual endeavors to implement voter ID laws. In this latest iteration of that ongoing battle, the Federal Election Assistance Commission has so far refused to help state officials in Kansas and Arizona change federal election registration forms to include proof of citizenship. Both states have new voter-ID measures measures that require new voters to provide a birth certificate, passport, or other documentation to prove their citizenship, while the federal registration form only requires that new voters sign a statement declaring that they are citizens. On Wednesday, a federal judge basically told the Obama administration to stop deliberately getting in the states’ way on this one, via the LA Times:

A federal judge has ruled that Kansas and Arizona should be allowed to require voters to provide evidence of U.S. citizenship, in a case closely watched by both sides dealing with the question of voter eligibility.

U.S. District Judge Eric Melgren in Wichita, Kan., ruled that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission had no legal authority to deny requests from the two states to add the citizenship requirement. In the ruling, released Wednesday, he ordered the commission to revise the national form immediately. …

“This is a huge victory for the states of Kansas and Arizona,” Kobach said in a prepared statement emailed to reporters. “They have successfully protected our sovereign right to set and enforce the qualifications for registering to vote. We have now paved the way for all 50 states to protect their voter rolls and ensure that only U.S. citizens can vote.”

“Today’s decision is an important victory for the people of Arizona against the Obama administration, assuring that only Arizona residents and not illegals vote in Arizona elections,” Arizona Atty. Gen. Tom Horne said in a statement.

“Only Arizona residents and not illegals”? Well, that of course is just ridiculous, because as we know perfectly well by now — we know, because progressives continuously tell us so — voter fraud is absolutely not a real thing. Voter-ID laws are just vacuous excuses made up by Republicans in order to maliciously disenfranchise minority voters. “Proof of citizenship” requirement? Ha! I mean, can you say “racist dog whistle”? …Via Guy Benson:

Tags: Arizona, Eric Holder, justice department, Kansas, Obama administration, racism, voter fraud, voter-ID

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