Andrew C. McCarthy:
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
When Republican leaders rationalized confirming Loretta Lynch as attorney general — notwithstanding her stated commitment to facilitating President Obama’s lawlessness – they mumbled about how the country needed to end the tenure of Eric Holder. You may remember him as the original Obama attorney general whose confirmation Republicans strongly supported despite extensive evidence of his unfitness.
As a number of us countered, and as anyone with a shred of common sense knows, major Justice Department policy is and has always been set by President Obama. While Ms. Lynch is temperamentally different from Mr. Holder, her confirmation portended no change of direction.
And so . . . no sooner has Attorney General Lynch been sworn in than she has continued Mr. Holder’s crusade against state and local police departments. She announced on Friday that the Justice Department has opened a “pattern or practice” investigation of the Baltimore Police Department to determine whether — actually, to pave the way for the preordained conclusion that — the BPD systematically violates civil rights. The pretext for the investigation is the death of Freddie Gray in police custody on April 12.
It is important to understand that Holder’s crusade was never Holder’s alone. To repeat, Obama dictates Justice Department policy.
Back in 2008, Republican strategists were scared to death to be seen as inquiring into, much less attacking, Barack Obama’s radical background. No need to dwell on his ties to former terrorist Bill Ayers, we were told. As I (among others) protested at the time, while Ayers’s terrorist past was alarming, it was not the most troubling aspect of Obama’s association with him.
Ayers had remained a proud anti-American radical who openly argued that our country was incorrigibly racist and corrupt. Yet Obama had colluded with him on their joint left-wing passion: criminal-justice “reform.” They appeared on a panel together to argue for keeping even violent juvenile offenders out of the adult justice system. They worked together on boards of left-wing charities to direct funding to like-minded radicals. In 1997, Ayers wrote a book, A Kind and Just Parent: Children of the Juvenile Court, which (as Stanley Kurtz hasobserved) compares America’s juvenile-justice system to the mass detention of young blacks under South African apartheid. Obama, then a state lawmaker in Illinois, lavishly praised the book as a “searing and timely account.”
A key, if little noticed, part of Obama’s domestic agenda from the start has been to roll back lawful police methods that dramatically reduce crime.
Understand then: For upwards of a quarter-century, we’ve enjoyed a staggering decrease in crime rates nationally, particularly in urban areas, because of engaged, intelligence-driven policing methods. During that time, Obama has been playing for the other team: academic and activist detractors who point to the overrepresentation of blacks in the offender population in a racially charged attack on policing — rather than emphasizing that the overrepresentation of blacks as crime victims is ameliorated by modern policing.
A key, if little noticed, part of Obama’s domestic agenda from the start has been to roll back lawful police methods that dramatically reduce crime. As I’ve previously explained, the Democrat-controlled Congress in the first years of the Clinton presidency gave him the tool he needed: the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. It enables the attorney general to file lawsuits against cities and towns that, it contends, engage “in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers#..#that deprives persons of [federal] rights.”
Unless motivated by the politics of racism, why would the DOJ conduct an investigation into the behavior of the Baltimore PD BEFORE the trials of the 6 officers has concluded? There is more than enough evidence of political and racial motivation by the State’s attorney to warrant taking a step back and seeking more accurate information.
But, of course, justice is not the goal of this attorney, this DOJ or this administration. These last two years of this onerous administration will be the most dangerous.
did you expect differently? Lynch is the best friend of holder’s wife. obama nominated her and the fools on the hill voted her in (nothing has changed even with the new regime) so that she could do her best from keeping holder from going to jail. obama only surrounds himself with kiss-asses and those that will do his bidding.