A Question of Justice

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our first full-fledged ideological battle of the fledgling Obama administration.

The sniping at Rahm is mostly about his slashing, send-'em-a-dead-fish partisanship. The argument over Hillary has mostly been about the political implications of her working for her former rival and the potential complications of Bill the globe-trotter.

But Eric Holder is a whole different story. Some folks on the right really don't like him as the next attorney general -- and, guess what, neither do some folks on the left.

The initial reports on the former Justice Department official focused on a) his race and b) his role in the infamous Marc Rich pardon. But I suspect we're in for a much deeper debate.

Have you wondered, by the way, why all these appointments -- Tom Daschle for HHS is the latest -- keep leaking? This, from the No Drama Obama operation that managed to keep the Biden choice a secret until the wee hours on the day he was announced?

The answer is that Obama no longer operates in a self-contained campaign world. His team has to do soundings to figure out whether his potential nominees will get bloodied in Senate confirmation hearings, and the Hill is the leakiest place on earth. FBI agents have to talk to colleagues and neighbors as they conduct background checks. So there's almost no way to keep a tight lid on these appointments. Welcome to Washington, Mr. President-elect.

So now we're looking at an administration with Bill Clinton's senior adviser as chief of staff; his wife as secretary of state; his acting attorney general as AG; his impeachment lawyer, Greg Craig, as counsel; his chief of staff, John Podesta, as transition chief; Gore's counsel, Lisa Brown, as staff secretary; and Gore's chief of staff, Ron Klain, as Biden's chief of staff. Boy, it's a good thing Hillary didn't get elected; she would have just given us a recycled version of the Clinton administration.

We get quite a glimpse of the right's antipathy toward Holder, a former U.S. attorney in the District, in this National Review broadside:

"As we observed throughout the campaign, Barack Obama gave indications that his election would mean a return to the September 10 mentality, a national-security outlook marked prominently by its lack of seriousness about the terrorist threat. In choosing Eric Holder to be his attorney general, President-Elect Obama has taken a step toward confirming those misgivings. . . .

"Holder's rise, like Obama's own, is of symbolic significance, as he now has been nominated to be the nation's first black attorney general. Symbolism, however, cannot camouflage the fact that Holder is a conventional, check-the-boxes creature of the Left.

"He is convinced justice in America needs to be 'established' rather than enforced; he's excited about hate crimes and enthusiastic about the constitutionally dubious Violence Against Women Act; he's a supporter of affirmative action and a practitioner of the statistical voodoo that makes it possible to burden police departments with accusations of racial profiling and the states with charges of racially skewed death-penalty enforcement; he's more likely to be animated by a touchy-feely Reno-esque agenda than traditional enforcement against crimes; he's in favor of ending the detentions of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and favors income redistribution to address the supposed root causes of crime."

And, on Rich: "Holder's role was aptly described as 'unconscionable' by a congressional committee. He steered Rich's allies to retain the influential former White House counsel Jack Quinn (Holder later conceded he hoped Quinn would help him become attorney general in a Gore administration); he helped Quinn directly lobby Clinton, doing an end-run around the standard pardon process (including DOJ's pardon attorney); and he kept the deliberations hidden from the district U.S. attorney and investigative agencies prosecuting Rich so they couldn't learn about the pardon application and register their objections."