The Holder Pattern

He's the first black U.S. Attorney General in history, he's the fourth-longest serving attorney general in history, and he's considered by many to be the most controversial and divisive attorney general ever by people who forgot about John Mitchell of Edwin Meese,  but one thing you can't say about Eric Holder is that his tenure has been boring.  Holder announced this past week that he's stepping down as the nation's chief law enforcement officer after more than five-and-half years.  He won't go quietly, largely because he'll have to wait a few months before he can go; President Obama has to name a successor, and that successor is unlikely to be quickly confirmed by the Senate. If the Republicans win control of the Senate in November, that successor might not ever get confirmed at all.

Holder's record is mixed, not the shining example of the administration of justice that liberals say it is and not the unmitigated disaster that conservatives say it is.  He gets points for vigorously attempting to undo the Republican attacks on voting rights (even if his victories have been few and far between, if even that), but his prosecutions of corporate wrongdoing have yielded the type of fines that big companies can shrug off without effort.  Furthermore, Holder himself has stated that the size of the large financial institutions he's gone after makes it hard for the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against them, because such charges can threaten a bank's existence and, by association, the companies it's connected to, possibly hurting the national or international or international economy.  Not exactly a profile in courage, he. 

I won't comment on Holder's handling of Operation Fast and Furious, because that gun sting operation was too fast and furious for me to follow, let alone analyze or understand.  And I still can't decide on whether his efforts to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court was the right thing to do, but so what - he couldn't do it, that case ended up being left to military justice.  Overall, though, I would have to concluded that Holder was a good man in way over his head.  He simply has had more failures than successes, some of them embarrassing.  Alas, no attorney general under Obama, not even one who is more up to the challenge than Holder was, will be able to accomplish much so long as the Republicans want to take this President down.  And I have a feeling they're going to do it, too.