Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch
Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch faced Sen. Chuck Grassley's (R-IA) Judiciary Committee Wednesday, the first day in her confirmation hearings. Most of the
promised Republican crazy is going to come in a following hearing, where Grassley's hand-picked, nut-job witnesses will testify. But Wednesday wasn't without its low, very low, moments. Most prominent was a Republican obsession with President Obama's "illegal" action on "amnesty" and whether she agreed with them that the president is a criminal. She
didn't.
The importance of the issue was underscored when Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the new Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made it the very first question posed to Ms. Lynch.
Ms. Lynch said she had read the Justice Department’s legal opinions and added, "I don't see any reason to doubt the reasonableness of those views." Pressed again later in the hearing, she would not say whether she would have reached the same conclusion under her own analysis.
That set of a whole round of "are you another Eric Holder" questions. Literally.
Republican dissatisfaction with Mr. Holder was a dominant theme of the hearing. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, went so far as to ask: "You're not Eric Holder, are you?"
She replied, at least half a dozen times to various iterations of that question from various Republicans that she was not indeed Eric Holder and that "if confirmed as attorney general, I will be myself. I will be Loretta Lynch." She might have convinced them. Republicans on the panel were indeed so obsessed with their seething hatred of Eric Holder that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
felt compelled to remind them that the previous Justice Department was so politicized and so scandal-ridden and so corrupt that President Bush's Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, was forced to resign.
Not all of the committee was intent on hating on Holder and immigrants, all day. There was a loopy detour into social issues thanks to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). It's pretty amazing, in fact, that in a committee that includes Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (TX) and Mike Lee (UT) and Thom Tillis (NC), the most insane question of the day came from Graham who asked, with no apparent embarrassment, “[w]hat's the legal difference between a ban on same-sex marriage being unconstitutional but a ban on polygamy being constitutional? Could you try to articulate how one could be banned under the constitution and the other not?" To her credit, Lynch remained poised and did not laugh out loud. Saying she hadn't reviewed all the case law, she simply said "I certainly would not be able to provide you with that analysis at this point in time, but I look forward to continuing the discussions with you." I bet she looks forward to that.