The Republicans are gearing up to delay the confirmation of Eric Holder. The 111th Congress is sworn in on January 3rd, 2009, and starts session January 6th. It’ll be important to start hitting your local critter with letters and phone calls as soon as the 111th Congress is seated.  Defeating a nomination is difficult work, but Holder is bad enough we should give it the old college try, and there’s a lot of blue dog Democrats out there that claim to be sympathetic to our issue. We should hold them to that.
UPDATE: I’ll put aside my differences with Senator Spector for now, since he’s one of the GOP senators that’s willing to start asking questions.
Senator Spector may be a mixed bag, but he did a fine job during the 1995 Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearings investingating the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident. So I’m sure Senator Spector would be interested in how much involvement Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder had in several troubling actions in the aftermath of the Ruby Ridge.
The FBI officials in the Office of Professional Responsibility did an outstanding job of naming names and fixing blame on the various FBI agents who screwed up at Ruby Ridge. Yet rather than act on those recommendations the FBI ignored them and punished the OPR people instead. I wonder how much Eric Holder had to do with that.
I also wonder how much involvement Eric Holder had in the shocking legal defense strategy of FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi when Boundary County Idaho charged Horiuchi with manslaghter of Vicki Weaver. The Horiuchi defense boiled down to a claim of Federal immunity from Idaho’s laws, since Horiuchi was a Federal agent just following orders; essentially a license to kill.
Oh, boy, that old creepy feeling from the 90s is working its way up my back when old Single Bullet Arlen takes the “lead investigator” mantle once again. Anybody remember the questions he refused to ask in the Waco and Ruby Ridge hearings?
We’d better be prepared to find somebody else on the committee to ask our questions. Because otherwise they won’t get asked.
Specter is very good at defying high expectations. Well, not even high expectations. Most of the times he’s a bastard.
Right now, Holders nomination hearing is scheduled for january 15th. It will be interesting to see if they can get this done before Obama takes office or not.