Attorney General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, at her nomination press conference five months ago.
Attorney General Eric Holder remains on the job, as Mitch McConnell continues to hold the nomination of Loretta Lynch—the first black woman to be nominated to the post—hostage to completely unrelated abortion politics. Holder is still on the job, but the organization is in a
holding pattern, unable to take on new initiatives because staff doesn't know what direction their new leadership might want to take. And some of it kind of matters.
Department officials haven't even been able to decide whether they should participate in a major international meeting on cybersecurity this spring.
"There is a constant complication about committing to things," said Robert Raben, a former assistant attorney general who is advising Lynch on the nomination and remains in touch with department officials. "For April and May, there are an enormous amount of things that are on hold. It's impossible for the leadership to know what to commit to, because they do not know if Ms. Lynch is going to have a different view." […]
James M. Cole, a former deputy attorney general who left in January, said the lack of permanent leadership hindered the department's effectiveness.
"There are law enforcement matters, national security matters, civil rights issues, police department [investigations]—issues that you start to disrupt when you have somebody waiting in the wings who you know is going to get in, but they are not there yet," Cole said. "In any major case, including organized crime or corruption or national security, you want somebody who is going to make the ultimate decisions who has been able to follow the case through from the beginning."
Earlier this month, Lynch
secured the final necessary Republican vote to be confirmed. The hostage situation, however, remains.
McConnell won't allow a vote on Lynch until Democrats cry uncle on a dangerous expansion of the anti-abortion Hyde amendment, a decades-long prohibition on federal funding of abortions. This is even worse than Hyde. It would put the prohibition on money that isn't even coming from taxpayers, but from a victims compensation fund—not federally appropriated money. Not to mention what a way to punish human trafficking victims who might have gotten pregnant while held in sex slavery. For that, McConnell is refusing to allow the Lynch confirmation to move forward.