President-Elect Barack Obama’s nomination of Eric Holder to be attorney general surprised many. There are reasons that Holder ought not to be confirmed, but regardless of that, his nomination tells us quite a bit about Obama and the Supreme Court he will likely give this country......And that tells us two things about our next president.
First, he is doubtless only trying to nominate Holder because the Democrats have at least a 58-42 advantage in the Senate. Only nine cabinet nominations have been denied by the Senate in all of American history. While others have been withdrawn for various reasons, you can count on your hands the number that failed when the president decides to demand a vote.
The fact that Obama is willing to ignore the “Do No Harm” rule that usually accompanies cabinet picks shows that he is going to push the envelope on a number of issues.
This nomination might also shed light on the kind of policies Obama will pursue. Despite Obama’s new lip service to the Second Amendment, Holder signed onto a brief earlier this year reaffirming his long-held position that the Second Amendment confers no rights whatsoever to private citizens, and that the Supreme Court should have upheld D.C.’s absolute ban on handguns, even in homes. Holder also has far-left views on unrestricted abortion, and opposes the death penalty. And, in a war on terror, Holder believes that all the rights that U.S. citizens have in civilian courts should be extended to foreign terrorists captured abroad.
A president’s pick for attorney general also foreshadows the kind of judges the president will nominate. By picking Eric Holder, Obama is showing that he is dead serious about his campaign promise to appoint far-left judges like Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, plunging this nation further into a regime where unelected, unaccountable jurists impose their personal political views on the rest of us through the courts, declaring the Constitution to require whatever they think the public policy should be.
(Ken Blackwell, "Telling Nomination" in Dec. 16 National Review Online.)
