U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced his resignation yesterday, and editorial boards across the country are now analyzing his legacy.
First up, The New York Times:
By any measure, the nearly-six-year tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has been one of the most consequential in United States history. His decision to resign, which he announced on Thursday, was long anticipated; he has said he will stay on through his successor’s confirmation. It is hard to imagine that anyone who could make it through the current Senate would have an impact comparable to Mr. Holder’s.
As the first African-American to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official, Mr. Holder broke ground the moment he took office. In a position that rarely rewards boldness — and in the face of a frequently hostile Congress — Mr. Holder has continued to stake out strong and laudable legal positions on many of the most contested issues of our time. But his record is marred by the role the Justice Department played in matters of secrecy and national security under his leadership.
The Los Angeles Times looks at the rights and wrongs under Eric Holder:
It was Holder who, just a month into the new administration, challenged the notion that the U.S. was genuinely an ethnic melting pot; on matters of race, he offered, it was “essentially a nation of cowards.” It was Holder who fumed at his treatment by a House committee and suggested that members were hard on him and the president because of their race. It was Holder, not Obama, who traveled to Ferguson, Mo., to help calm a community riven by riots after a white police officer shot a young, black man.
The trip to Ferguson may have been ill-advised — it placed Holder in the dual role of assuaging anger at the police department while supervising a presumably impartial investigation into whether that same department was violating civil rights laws. But his stalwart determination to confront injustice has been a strength as well. Among other things, he has defended embattled voting rights, pressed hard for marriage equality and initiated an important overhaul of federal drug sentencing laws.
Much more below the fold.
Newsday:
...Holder should best be remembered not just as the nation's first African-American in the post, but an attorney general who restored vibrancy to Justice Department Civil Rights Division efforts to tackle racial and sexual discrimination, including voting rights violations, excessive mandatory drug sentences and breaches of gay rights. He also made it a priority for local U.S. attorneys to root out public corruption.
Michael Sherer at TIME:
Through his tenure, Holder often referred to the portrait of his predecessor Robert F. Kennedy, which hangs in his office, as a guiding light for him. Like Kennedy’s efforts to address civil rights issues in the 1960s, Holder’s department made criminal justice reform a priority, and has worked aggressively to continue to challenge limits on voting rights after the Supreme Court overturned parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Holder has also launched a number of high profile investigations of the conduct of local police departments in about 20 cities, often obtaining consent agreements that change police conduct.
In a major address to the American Bar Association in August of 2013, Holder did not just lay out a set of reforms to reduce prison terms and improve rehabilitation efforts, but he also challenged the country for what he saw as moral failures. “One deeply troubling report… indicates that in recent years black male offenders have received sentences nearly 20 percent longer than those imposed on white males convicted of similar crimes,” he said. “This isn’t just unacceptable—it is shameful. It’s unworthy of our great country, and our great legal tradition.”
Nia-Malika Henderson at The Washington Post:
From his first days on the job, it was clear that Attorney General Eric Holder was unbound by the racial constraints that his boss, President Obama, operated under...For Obama, Holder has been a link to the civil rights community and that tradition of black protest and righteous anger. In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, Michael Brown's grandfather, Lesley McSpadden, in an interview on MSNBC, questioned Obama's cautious approach to matter, saying: "Now is the time for my president to step forward. ...I want to say this to my president: I voted for you, so you ought to be able to vent with me."
For the last six years, Holder has been the answer to that plea.
Who will answer it now?
The Denver Post:
[S]omewhat surprisingly, Holder had a blind spot when it came to some civil liberties — especially involving the press.
Under his initiative, the Obama administration brought criminal charges in eight cases of unauthorized leaks, more than all previous administrations combined. And no less egregiously, the Justice Department secretly acquired Associated Press phone records.
Let's hope his successor adopts a broader perspective on legal rights.
Jay Bookman hits the nail on the head:
I’m going to miss Eric Holder as attorney general, and the over-the-top, “ding-dong-the-wicked-witch-is-dead!!”-type celebrations that you’re now seeing on the right are a big part of the reason.
No, Holder wasn’t perfect in the role. No one is. Yes, a lot of anger and worse was aimed in his direction.
But let’s be honest. Nothing Holder said or did came close to justifying the disproportionate scale of vitriol against him. The free-floating paranoia that has come to define modern conservatism, and that for a variety of reasons focused on Holder as its target, existed long before he was appointed attorney general, and it will continue unabated after he is gone. Blaming him for creating it would be like blaming a lightning rod for creating lightning.
Matt Apuzzo writing in The New York Times:
Mr. Holder, who announced his resignation Thursday, frequently invoked the Kennedy legacy as he made civil rights the centerpiece of his six-year tenure. He succeeded in reducing lengthy prison sentences, opened civil rights investigations against police departments in record numbers and challenged identification requirements for voters.
“I have loved the Department of Justice ever since, as a young boy, I watched Robert Kennedy prove during the civil rights movement how the department can — and must always — be a force for that which is right,” Mr. Holder said at a White House farewell on Thursday.
But Mr. Holder has continued Mr. Kennedy’s work in another way, one he is less likely to embrace but is no less part of his legacy. Like Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Holder has frustrated and confounded even his staunchest allies for his views on civil liberties.
And, on a final note,
Ari Berman at The Nation examines Eric Holder's voting rights legacy:
Holder made restoring the credibility of the Civil Rights Division a leading cause. “In the last eight years, vital federal laws designed to protect rights in the workplace, the housing market, and the voting booth have languished,” he said at his confirmation hearing. “Improper political hiring has undermined this important mission. That must change. And I intend to make this a priority as attorney general.” […]
Holder generated a lot of controversy in many areas—some of it justified, much of it not. His defense of voting rights deserves to be remembered as one of the most consequential aspects of his tenure as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
