President Obama has been taking only tentative steps back into the public eye, but former Attorney General Eric Holder is planning to become a lot more visible in his opposition to Team Trump's efforts to gut a half-century of American progress.
“I thought, frankly, along with everybody else, that after the election, with Hillary Clinton as president, I could walk off the field,” he said. “So when she didn’t win, I thought, ‘We’ll have to see how this plays out.’ But it became clear relatively soon — and certainly sooner than I expected — that I had to get back on the field and be in effective opposition.” [...]
“Up until my now our efforts have been largely organizational — raising funds, generating support,” Holder told Yahoo News. “But now we’re moving into an operational phase where we’ll be filing lawsuits and I’ll be more visible talking about those issues.”
Holder says he's working toward a national organization to coordinate legal resistance to a host of Trump policies. No longer would we have to rely on individual lawyers and groups being at the right airports at the right times, for example; coordinated efforts between like-minded states and groups would make each battle both easier to organize and more effective. In the meantime, he's lending his voice to efforts like California's SB 54, a bill to block the state's law enforcement officers from being forced to assist Trump's deportation efforts. Having a former attorney general back your effort is nothing to sneeze at:
Holder explained why he thinks SB 54 is constitutional (“the federal government does not have the ability to force states to do things that are inherently federal in nature”) and why, in his view, the Trump administration’s threats to withhold federal funding in response aren’t (“the federal government can’t coerce states into doing something states don’t want to do by threatening to withhold support”).
Much of the piece is focused on whether Holder will pursue a presidential run himself, but we're just going to ignore all of that because good God—can we not have just a moment's peace? The big news is that Eric Holder is jumping headfirst back into the anti-Trumpism fray, and that's unabashedly a good thing.