Holder was our firewall against GOP bigotry

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
New America Media Columnist

cash advance in novi mi One of the most poignant moments in Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.’s six-year tenure heading the Justice Department came in February 2009 barely a month after he had been confirmed as Attorney General. He told an overflow crowd celebrating Black History Month at the Justice Department that America was “cowardly” when it came to facing race and racism. That did it. From that moment on the lines were sharply and brutally drawn. The pack of right wing bloggers, web sites, and of course, the GOP, made Holder their Public Enemy Number 1. They would hector, hound, harass, demean, insult, and batter him at every turn. He was hauled before countless GOP controlled House committees and grilled mercilessly on everything from his alleged bungling and deceit in the fast and furious gun running sting to the reporter top Seattle Washinton cash advance leak flap in which he supposedly went after reporters in an effort to uncover damaging security leaks. The topper was the House’s frivolous lawsuit, a contempt citation and an equally frivolous and clumsy threat to impeach him.

The vicious baiting was never really about Holder. It was about President Obama and race. Obama, in the sense that Holder became the softest of soft targets in the GOP’s no holds barred campaign to hamstring Obama with the odor of scandal and in effect straightjacket his presidency. The race part was even more insidious. Holder meant what he said: that the nation had marched backward for every step it went forward in dealing with racial bias. He backed up his words with repeated actions on voting rights abuses, grotesque racially skewed sentencing disparities, and in his defense of gay has anyone ever got a loan with bad credit rights. This was crowned by his rush to St. Louis following the slaying of Michael Brown and putting dozens of FBI and Justice Department attorneys boots on the ground there with the strong hint that a civil rights prosecution could be in the offing if there was no state prosecution of Ferguson cop Darren Wilson for the killing of Brown. This sent the professional Holder baiters into a tizzy and again the shouts were long and loud for his head.

But Holder each time held fast and didn’t buckle. He even doubled down again on his blast at racism, noting on several occasions that he, as Michael Brown and countless other young Black males, had been profiled by police once as a law student and later as a federal prosecutor. To add even more payday loan on blue ridge to the GOP and Holder baiters’ vitriol, he had the audacity to reveal his personal experience with racial profiling in a keynote speech before the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention last April.

Sharpton went further in that speech and called out the GOP for its ruthless, cynical and politically calculating war against Obama. He noted that Obama had been vilified as no other president in living memory, and race was the reason. Holder could say that. Obama couldn’t at the risk of creating another firestorm and laying himself open even wider to the accusation that he was a race-baiting president. Holder in essence had license to say what Obama didn’t dare say but well knew to be true. So Holder continually and effectively provided a protective cover over Obama in taking on the critics on racial payday loans chicago illinois matters. And he provided the same protective cover over the key areas of civil rights and voting rights protections that no other attorney general had provided since Ramsey Clark during his tenure with the Lyndon Johnson Administration in the mid-to-late 1960s.

The proof of Holder’s effectiveness was the back hand perverse compliment the Holder baiters paid him in their euphoria over his resignation. They dredged up all the old distortions, myths, and lies about him in their rush to maliciously tar him as “the worst attorney general” the nation ever had. This spoke volumes about how much Holder was able to get under their skin, to the point they shouted in glee at his departure.

The beauty is that Holder leaves a solid legacy of accomplishment in the areas that have been and cash advance interest td continue to be the greatest flashpoints of public controversy, namely civil rights, racial justice and fairness. A final testament to Holder’s commitment here was his announcement three weeks before he announced his departure that the probe he ordered into the killing of Trayvon Martin was still active and that there were new developments to be announced. The implication was that there was still the possibility of civil rights charges being filed against Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. In doing so, Holder ended his tenure as he began it: taking controversial stances on issues that would surely send his army of detractors back into a froth. But that was vintage Holder. He was our firewall against GOP bigotry and we’ll sorely miss him.

This article originally published in the October 6, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.