Friday, May 4, 2012

It’s time for Eric Holder to follow the law

Every president, upon assumption of office, takes an oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The president’s attorney general, serving as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, is charged with faithfully upholding those laws for the president. After three years of pursuing selective and politically charged “justice,” it’s time for President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to start following the law. If they refuse to do so, Congress must rein them in.
Under Eric Holder’s Justice Department, justice has not been blind. Attorney General Holder and his staff have chosen which laws to prosecute and which ones to ignore.
Holder has chosen to file lawsuits against states that pass voter ID laws — laws that are passed by duly elected legislators and are universally popular with the residents of those states. Yet, Holder has chosen to refrain from prosecuting the New Black Panthers, who engaged in flagrant acts of voter intimidation in 2010. Holder has chosen to prosecute states that enforce federal immigration laws passed by Congress, yet he refrains from prosecuting those localities that violate our immigration laws. As in the case of the raid on Gibson Guitars, Holder and his staff have invented tenuous justifications for pursuing people who donate to Republican politicians.
Let’s be honest. Holder’s pattern of “discretionary justice” is undermining our system of checks and balances. It was the intent of the Founders that each branch not act independently of the others, yet that is what we are seeing with the current Justice Department. Holder continues to ignore laws that have been duly passed by Congress, such as the Wire Act.

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