McConnell Sets Republican Party Senate Priorities: Go After Eric Holder

Attorney-General Designate Eric Holder, not up to the GOP standards that gave us Alberto Gonzalez

According to the far right's nutroots, McConnell may not actually be speaking for bona fide reactionaries any longer, but-- discounting the worst of the extremists, like Malkin and Erick Erickson-- we find that somehow it is serial obstructionist Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and not nuclear psycho-obstructionist Jim DeMint (R-SC) who leads the GOP Senate caucus as minority leader. And, as such, it's McConnell, not the lunatic fringe like Malkin or Erickson, who sets the right-wing's toxic agenda.

No doubt McConnell will try again to kill Equal Pay For Equal Work with a filibuster, as his lobbyist pals are demanding-- even though he is likely to lose this time. But with Obama riding extremely high in the public opinion polls, McConnell doesn't want to overplay his hand on obstructing the president's cabinet nominations-- not when virtually the whole country is demanding the Obama Administration get to work cleaning up after Bush and the Republicans immediately. So McConnell has decreed that they will let all but one of Obama's nominee's slide and just concentrate all their vituperative firepower on one: Attorney General nominee Eric Holder.

Odd how Republican senators who solidly backed a low grade crook like Alberto Gonzalez, even after he was caught shredding the Constitution and politicizing the Justice Department, have decided to make Eric Holder's nomination as Attorney General their first big do-or-die stand.

McConnell said Holder “has got serious questions” to answer about his role in President Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich and “some other matters.”

Holder, as deputy attorney general in 2001, reviewed the pardon of Rich, who had fled the country to avoid tax evasion and illegal trading charges. Holder gave it a “neutral, leaning towards favorable” opinion. Republicans later criticized President Clinton for giving the pardon, noting that Rich’s wife was one of Clinton’s campaign donors.

Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, this week criticized Holder as someone who might not be independent from the president. In a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Specter compared Holder to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whom Specter had seen as too beholden to President Bush.

In between the "Rich-incident," a much-used Republican Party fundraising tool, and the Crisco anointment of John Ashcroft, George Bush appointed Holder Acting Attorney General. If Miss McConnell and the other partisan obstructionists had any questions back then, they certainly kept them to themselves.

What surprises me, though, is that McConnell is indicating that his corrupt and extremist caucus is giving a pass to Obama's most progressive appointment, Hilda Solis, as Labor Secretary. The polar opposite of the detestable Elaine Chao, McConnell's own "wife" of convenience, Solis is, after all, the very capable congresswoman who will be pushing strongly and effectively to counteract right-wing lies about the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the defeat of which seems to be the Republicans' top priority for 2009.

I'm sure Solis knows exactly how to counteract GOP poison claiming that union "thugs" try intimidating people, by pointing out Republican efforts like this one to devastate the rights of working men and women to organize and bargain collectively:

“This is the demise of a civilization… if a retailer has not gotten involved with this, if he has not spent money on this election… he should be shot.”

-GOP shill Bernie Marcus, former CEO of Home Depot, November 18, 2008