Breaking (From Yesterday!): Reason Foundation's Proactive No Vote on Eric Holder as Attorney General

Over at Reason.org, the website of the nonprofit Reason Foundation that publishes reason online, policy analyst Shikha Dalmia has been laying the cases for good, bad, and ugly picks of the President Obama cabinet.

In a piece written earlier this week, here's what she had to say about Eric Holder, who unfortunately has been nominated to be attorney general:

Among the bottom-of-the-barrel would be Eric Holder and Jamie Gorelick, both of whom were deputy attorney generals under Janet Reno…. Though Holder has a good resume, his positions and record suggest that he does not understand the constitutional limitations within which this office is supposed to operate. He is a drug warrior and even proposed to stiffen penalties for the possession of marijuana. He was also involved in the federal government's decision to seize Elian Gonzalez from his aunt's home and return him to Cuba without obtaining a court order, a terrible lapse of judgment. Nor is he a pillar of rectitude: There have been questions about whether he was completely upfront about the Justice Department's conduct in the Branch Davidians-Waco fiasco. And some suspect that he might have with-held information about billionaire fugitive and tax evader, Marc Rich, to facilitate Rich's pardon by President Clinton.

Equally bad would be Gorelick, who pushed, unsuccessfully, for the execution of Randy Weaver for killing federal agents in the botched raid in the Ruby Ridge case—rather than holding FBI agents accountable for killing Weaver's unarmed wife.

Appointing either of them will substitute one set of excesses with another and would not offer any fundamental rethinking of Justice's conduct or its powers.

Read who Dalmia wanted to become attorney general (and much more) by going here and here and here.