Goodbye, Eric, and Good Riddance

What can be said about Eric Holder’s six years as attorney general that PJ Media hasn’t already said?  The news that Holder is going to resign should be bittersweet to anyone who cares about racial equality and the rule of law.  The damage he has already done to the country leaves a turbulent wake that is ill-matched to the financial reward awaiting him at a shameless and large Washington, D.C., law firm.

Our country is more polarized and more racially divided because of Eric Holder.  He turned the power of the Justice Department into a racially motivated turnout machine for the Democratic Party.  That was his job in this administration, and he did it well.

When I first reported on the racially motivated law enforcement of Holder’s Justice Department, it seemed fanciful to some. But after six years of Holder hugging Al Sharpton, stoking racial division in places like Florida and Ferguson, after suing police and fire departments to impose racial hiring requirements, after refusing to enforce election laws that protect white victims or require voter rolls to be cleaned, after launching harassing litigation against peaceful pro-life protesters, after incident after incident of dishonesty and contempt before Congress — after all this, it was clear to anyone with any intellectual honesty that this man had a vision of the law at odds with the nation’s traditions.

Why would it surprise anyone he behaved as he did?  As I made clear in my book Injustice, he carried around a quote in his wallet for 40 years about race that, he explained to the Washington Post, indicated that he had common cause with the black criminal.  That’s a fact.  That’s who he is.

And few in the House knew how to hold him accountable.  Some who did are Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), Rep Frank Wolf (R-Va), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Rep. Daryl Issa (R-CA).  Unfortunately, too many others failed to understand what they were up against.

Eric Holder was a radical progressive who used the power of the federal government to impose his progressivism on the United States.  He loved big interventionist government that took sides based on your politics and your race.  He was a menace to the rule of law.

So he exits.  But instead of being shamed into obscurity as he ought to be, he will cash in.  He’ll abandon the tools of dividing Americans between black and white and worry about a new color: gold.  When Holder lands at a big and shameless lawfirm in Washington, D.C., it will say as much about the country in 2014 as Holder’s rancid tenure said about the modern Democratic Party.

That someone like Eric Holder can find a lucrative career in this town, and be feted at all the right cocktail parties, says a great deal about what we have lost as a nation.  In another era, a man like Holder, unmoored from the law and the truth would not have a future.  Instead, I suspect Holder has a very bright one.

Those of you clamoring for “indictments” or “prosecution” of the man can give up.  It isn’t going to happen.  Nothing is going to happen to him, except that he will move on to a job that even most “1 percenters” wouldn’t recognize.

Holder’s tenure represents the beginnings of a post-Constitutional era, where the chief law enforcement officer of the United States serves to dismantle legal traditions.  Holder is the first attorney general to whom law seemed to be an option, a suggestion on the way to a progressive future.  Most folks, and most lawyers, who didn’t devote daily attention to him might not have noticed the ground shifting during his tenure. But shift it did, and very deliberately.

Law, like liberty, is a tenuous thing. Failing to understand the sources of domestic tranquility, the sources of your relatively good life, usually also means failing to recognize the threats to that pleasant tranquility.  Holder used his time at Justice to do things that corrode the rule of law.  Law and liberty are precious things, and Holder did enormous damage to both.