The Republican Party is terrified by the idea of Eric Holder as Attorney General. Of all of the appointments to Obama’s Cabinet, this is the one that fills the Right with horror and dread. They have been working overtime to block this appointment. Since Holder was nominated, they have been defining him in the press and framing the issues in ways that they think they could use to take him out.
It started with his ties to the Clinton White House and that Marc Rich pardon and now they are working to bring up everything from Elian Gonzalez to Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky and any other nonsense they can throw into the air in the hopes of killing this appointment.
Why?
The answer is simple: Holder will investigate the political corruption in Washington.
And for the modern Republican Party an active and righteous Department of Justice prosecuting the crimes of the Bush years is a nightmare that fills them with dread.
And so they plan to go after Holder as their latest effort to obstruct justice.
They must be stopped.
To the jump...
As those who have been following my Diaries know, I have mostly written about the growing Jack Abramoff Scandal, the Republican Culture of Corruption and the abuse on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) a US Territory in the Western Pacific. I have been following this story since 1999 and writing about it here on Daily Kos since 2004.
It is a massive scandal and the Jack Abramoff thread is just a filthy core sample in a glacier of Republican Corruption that has poisoned our politics for decades. Sure, there are corrupt Democrats, but they are usually kinda of dumb and old school in their graft. They do it for the money for themselves and their families. It is not systematic. It is the corruption of individuals as opposed to the intentional corruption of the systems, agencies and foundation of government. The latter is what the Republican Party has been engaged in for the last 40 years.
Since at least the 1960s, the correct word to describe the modern Republican Party and the Conservative Movement in the United States is Corruptionist and the roots of the Corruptionist tendencies of the American Conservative movement go back at least to the war profiteers of the Civil War.
This web of deceit, greed and corruption is exposed in the recent book by Thomas Frank, "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule". (This would be a fine Holiday gift for folks who should know more about the roots of the conservative movement and the Abramoff scandal).
In his book, Frank exposes the Right as a gang of Corruptionists destroying America for fun and profit. They have turned scandal and incompetence into a profitable growth industry. They have captured every agency of the Federal Government and spent decades destroying them as agents of change for the common good. The original purpose of every law, regulation and agency created since 1932 has been perverted. When Conservatives are in charge things break, incompetence is useful, debts skyrocket and cynicism is rewarded. Failure of government is the goal and a profit center for the weasels of the Right.
We could all point to countless examples of this intentional destruction over the last eight years and it is hard to select which bit of dirty work was the worst. For me it has been the willful destruction of the rule of law and the Department of Justice.
This is the part of the Government that has a duty to put the Constitution and the Laws of America first. This is the place where Justice should trump Party, where integrity trumps loyalty, honor trumps political embarrassment and fairness trumps political vendettas. Under George W. Bush the rule of Law was tuned inside out and grotesquely perverted.
Bush and Cheney led the way. Ashcroft, Gonzales and Mukasey each helped to pervert the rule of law in America. And Congress gave this parade of Constitutional destruction the right-of-way. Protecting this destruction of our Constitution and laws were men like Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and the rest of his Republican caucus. Their blind eye to the corruption of the Bush years makes their attack on the nomination of Eric Holder drip with hypocrisy and fear.
It is Specter who is leading the charge to relive the manufactured scandals of the Clinton years in a desperate attempt to frame the Holder nomination as a continuation of those "scandals" and taint the Obama Administration with a whiff of newly manufacture GOP certified "non-scandal". It is nothing more than an attempt to, once again, obstruct justice.
Sadly, we have some fools in the Democratic Senate Leadership who will still bend over backwards and let the GOP take control of how issues are discussed and framed. I am appalled that Leahy will give the GOP so much time and room to blow smoke and spin bullshit into "concerns" as they feverishly try to protect their own exposure to prosecution by obstructing the Confirmation of Eric Holder as Attorney General.
Now most people know very little about Eric Holder and you are not likely to learn a lot if you follow the coverage of his nomination in the press. This profile in the NYTs is a good example of the type of coverage of Eric Holder being presented to the public. It makes note of his support of Barack Obama and his service on the VP selection team. And it spends more time talking about the Marc Rich pardon than it does about his career. To read this "profile" you would only know the barest details of his record—and his record fighting political corruption has all but been scrubbed from the narrative. This is the story of Eric Holder as a life-long fighter of political corruption is being buried by the Right Wing and their sycophants in the media. It is this story that we need to get out. It should be at the forefront of every discussion of the Holder Nomination to counteract the current deceitful framing of the Right.
Eric Holder has been an anti-corruptionist since his first job out of Law School. While he was in law school he worked one summer at the NAACP and the next at the Department of Justice. When he graduated, Holder went to work for the DOJ.
In the wake of the Watergate scandal the DOJ formed a new investigative section, the Public Integrity Section. It is tasked with fighting public corruption through the prosecution of elected and appointed public officials at all levels of government. Since 1978 the Section has been required to send an annual report to Congress on their efforts to root out public corruption. This is where Eric Holder went to work in 1976 and he stayed there through 1988. Of all the moving parts of the DOJ this is the section that Holder knows best. It is also the section that has been severely damaged and hamstrung by the Bush Administration in the effort to obstruct investigations into Republican wrong doing. Holder’s hands on knowledge and dedication to the mission of the Public Integrity Section is the biggest reason why the Republican Party fears him so much and why they are pulling out all the stops to fight his nomination. After all, when Holder was at the Public Integrity Section he went after Democrats and Republicans. It did not matter. While he was at the DOJ Holder worked to prosecute the ABSCAM scandal and helped to put a corrupt Democratic Congressman, John Jenrette, in jail. If they broke their public trust, he went after them. This would be a refreshing change from the Bush years.
In 1988 he was appointed by Ronald Reagan to be an Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. He served there until 1993 when Bill Clinton appointed him the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia—a position that is pivotal partner for the Public Integrity Section as they try and prosecute DC based political corruption. It was in this role as DC’s US Attorney that Holder brought down one of the most powerful politicians in Washington, Dan Rostenkowski as part of the "Post Office" scandal. Holder had no problem going after a corrupt Democrat even he as had to know it would hurt his Party in the 1994 Mid-term Election—and it did.
There is not a single Republican in the Bush DOJ who could say the same. Tom DeLay, Don Young, Karl Rove, Roy Blunt, John Ascroft, Dana Rorhabacher, Jerry Lewis and the countless other Republicans who have been implicated in just the Abramoff Scandal are ALL still awaiting action from a Department of Justice that is infested with GOP partisans dedicated to slowing the wheels of justice to a crawl. The thought of Eric Holder cleaning house and getting these countless investigations back on track fills the GOP with dread. This is the reason that Rove, Gingrich and others shout "Marc Rich" or "Elian!" every time Holder’s name is mentioned—he scares the shit out of them. They know that Holder will get the wheels of justice turning and then the gig is over and their number is up.
In 1997, Holder became the Assistant Attorney General. Now for those who do not remember the Clinton years, it is worth remembering that the DOJ was very different that the shadow DOJ currently surviving the Bush years. Back then, the DOJ allowed investigations of the President to proceed, no matter how silly. There were endless investigations and yet the DOJ never stepped in to protect Bill Clinton. Now some will find fault with that, but on the whole it was the right call. The DOJ works for the people and not the President. It is not the job of the DOJ to protect the President, or any politician, from an investigation into their activities. Over the last eight years we have seen a dedication to protecting Bush and GOP politicians. We have seen what a politicized DOJ is like and it has caused great harm to our Nation. It is time to restore honor and integrity to the DOJ and Eric Holder is the just the guy to do that.
And so the GOP will oppose him. Not out of principle but self preservation. Their corruption is so vast and so deep that Holder scares them to their vile rotten cores. They should be scared and we should get Holder’s back.
When Specter and his gang bring up Rich and Elian and Watergate and all the GOP invented scandals of the Clinton years we need Senators who will bring up Abramoff and Cunningham and Rove and Katrina and Blackwater and torture and all the unresolved scandals of the Bush years. Holder should be asked how to restore the Public Integrity Section and how to root out those DOJ employees who have been obstructing justice from within. They could point to the example of Robert Coughlin who has plead guilty to helping Abramoff and his fellow corruptionists from within the DOJ. One might even ask why the Baltimore office of the US Attorney had to be brought in to investigate Bush appointees in the DC office of the DOJ where Coughlin used to work. And then there are the many ties between Jack Abramoff and John Ashcroft that have never been investigated.
Specter and the GOP may want to discuss the scandals of the 1990s. Sure, I can see why they want to run from the Bush years, but we need to keep the focus on the scandals of the last eight years. We need to ensure that these many crimes are investigated and that justice in once again part of our American system. There are way too many Bush era scandals where justice has been delayed and obstructed for us to allow the GOP and their sycophants in the media to frame the Hearings on the Eric Holder Nomination as a rerun of the spin from the old Right Wing nonsense of the Clinton years.
I have Holder’s back in this fight. I hope you will join me in fighting these weasels.
Cheers
UPDATE: Two more data points
Since I published this Diary I have come across two more data points that support much of what I have been saying.
One is today’s WSJ column by Thomas Frank, Welcome to the Blagosphere.
In it, Frank ties the corruption of Blagojevich to the system of corruption he exposed in his recent book, The Wrecking Crew. The link is that both Republican corruption and the Blagojevich/Ryan wing of Illinois politics use "Free Market" approach to politics and "public service:
...Mr. Blagojevich is nothing if not entrepreneurial. If the affidavit is to be believed, the man intuits the cold ways of the market as well as any Nobel Prize-winning economist from Hyde Park. A seat in the U.S. Senate, in his immortal words, "is a [very!] valuable thing, you don't just give it away for nothing."
The schemes Blago allegedly invented to "monetize" his public authority, while never rising to the sophistication of, say, a credit default swap, still showed a cunning that would command the respect of any Wall Street Ponzi master. [snip]
With the exception of the labor scheme, none of Blago's ideas were identifiably liberal. And consider the particular political situation in which he flourished. Campaign contributions are basically unlimited in Illinois, making possible the deals he allegedly dreamed up, each of them so outrageous they reminded Fitzgerald of "a salesman meeting his annual sales target."
Which points us, finally, to the defining idea of machine politics: the conception of the state as a business in which every public function is for sale. "It is good business that causes bad government," a reformer told muckraker Lincoln Steffens over a century ago. When George W. Bush announced that "government should be market-based," he was merely applying an ideological gloss to this ancient and supremely bad idea.
And Frank offers a remedy that the Holder Nominations also points towards. It is a remedy that causes corrupt politicos on both sides of the isle to sweat with fear:
So let President-elect Obama recruit a thousand Patrick Fitzgeralds. Let him turn them loose on Chicago, on Washington, and on every corner of public life where the market-based ideal still survives. Sic semper tyrannis.
To the Point is a Public Radio talk show out of KCRW in Los Angeles. Yesterday they had a show discussing whether or not the Bush would ever be held accountable for their crimes, especially the issue of torture. Here is the link to the show. At roughly the 27:00 minute mark a conversation begins about Holder’s Nomination Hearing and if he will be pressed on investigating torture as part of the hearing. Scott Horton points out that the Rove led Republican attack on Holder is an attempt to block any such investigation from ever happening.
As things stand we will need to pressure Obama, Holder and Congress to investigate the crimes of the Bush years. The default will be to let the past be in the past, but we need to push back on this bi-partisan effort to embrace a "great forgetting". The push-back on the Holder Nomination is where this battle will be joined. We need to be in the fight not just to protect the Holder Nomination, but also to force a commitment from the new President and Congress to investigate these many crimes where ever the trail leads.
Cheers
ps: thanks for getting this on the Rec list.
UPDATE 2: A story on Holder's early years with the DOJ
Earlier today the Philadelphia Inquirer published a report on Holder's early years as a DOJ prosecutor with the Public Integrity Section. It is worth a read and I think that it helps to underscore my point.
Cheers