Word: holderness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Eric Holder Jr. was trained long ago in crime and punishment. He grew up in the East Elmhurst section of Queens, N.Y.--so populated by cops and firefighters that rush hour looked like the shift change at a station house. A popular teen prank was setting off the red fire-alarm box near his modest brick house on 101st Street. Nearly everyone tried it once, but not Eric, the churchgoing Boy Scout who knew the consequence of disobeying rules: "A good, quick smack on the bottom," his mother Miriam recalls. "If you did something wrong, you're going to have...
That rule guided Holder after he left Queens to become a corruption prosecutor, municipal judge and U.S. Attorney. And it will probably guide him as the nation's 82nd Attorney General. Holder takes over a sprawling, 110,000-person Justice Department that was treated at times like a private law firm by the Bush Administration, both in its novel interpretation of the law and in the way it purged employees who did not share its political views. Returning to the department he helped run in the late 1990s, Holder invited all employees to his grand fifth-floor office to introduce...
Harry Truman, who became the holder of the first Medicare card for his support of the legislation, also succeeded in getting a bill passed in 1958 that provided former presidents with a pension, staff, and office space. Prior to that, ex-presidents received no such retirement benefits (Truman was fairly broke when he left office). And finally, Richard Nixon mediated a baseball umpire's strike in 1985. We don't know what to make of that either...
...Even in the Lewinsky case, Holder appeared to reverse course and seemed determined to blunt the investigation he had unleashed, lending DOJ's legal support to a dubious privilege claimed by the Secret Service to keep its agents from testifying...
...nominee's closest friends and defenders acknowledge that Holder made mistakes in the Rich case. But they explain his support for the FALN clemency as simply executing the President's constitutional right to commute prison sentences. And they say his views of the Starr investigation evolved because of questionable actions by Starr, not White House pressure. Holder will have a chance to answer every challenge to his integrity. The Judiciary Committee will test how well those explanations hold...