THE HOLDER LEGACY – AT 10:21 A.M. ET:   Eric Holder is resigning as attorney general.  His legacy is being assessed.  Our side, of course, is harshly critical.  Holder politicized the Justice Department, not that it hasn't been done before.  He, though, has been particularly outrageous, starting with his decision not to prosecute the Black Panthers for voter obstruction in Philadelphia on election day, 2008.  Justice Department lawyers felt it was an open-and-shut case, but was dropped.  Holder has also gone after voter I.D. laws, which not only are popular, but necessary to prevent voter fraud.

Former Reagan Attorney-General Ed Meese, and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, lay out the case against Holder in a superb piece for The Wall Street Journal.  Required reading: 

Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced his resignation on Thursday, leaves a dismal legacy at the Justice Department, but one of his legal innovations was especially pernicious: the demonizing of state attempts to ensure honest elections.

As a former U.S. attorney general under President Reagan, and a former Ohio secretary of state, we would like to say something that might strike some as obvious: Those who oppose photo voter-ID laws and other election-integrity reforms are intent on making it easier to commit vote fraud.

That conclusion is inescapable, given the well-established evidence that voter-ID laws don't disenfranchise minorities or reduce minority voting, and in many instances enhance it, despite claims to the contrary by Mr. Holder and his allies. As more states adopt such laws, the left has railed against them with increasing fury, even invoking the specter of the Jim Crow era to describe electoral safeguards common to most nations, including in the Third World.

Ascribing racial animus to people who are trying to safeguard democratic integrity is a crude yet effective political tactic that obscures the truth.

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  It's a stunning indictment of a political attorney general.  I'd imagine Obama's choice for successor will be of the same stripe.  We hope that a Republican Senate will have the chance to vote on his or her confirmation.

September 29,  2014