California, which is facing a pension crisis that could easily bankrupt the state, has big plans. Governor Moonbeam wants to launch satellites to fight Global Warming. Millions will be spent to protect illegal aliens. And Eric Holder will still be paid to protect his old policies. You can't get Eric to kick his taxpayer money habit that easily.
California lawmakers already are preparing for a legal brawl with the Donald Trump administration – and they’ve got President Obama’s former top attorney in their corner.
Top state Democratic lawmakers announced Wednesday that former Attorney General Eric Holder has been tapped as outside counsel to advise the Legislature on potential challenges with the Trump government. He will lead a team from the Covington & Burling law firm, where he’s been working since leaving the Obama administration in 2015.
“With the upcoming change in administrations, we expect that there will be extraordinary challenges for California in the uncertain times ahead,” California Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said in a statement. “This is a critical moment in the history of our nation. We have an obligation to defend the people who elected us and the policies and diversity that make California an example of what truly makes our nation great.”
Except that Holder isn't noted as a great legal mind. He's just a handy radical with no ethics to have in your corner if your name is Barack or Bill. He makes a very useful Attorney General. But I'm not too sure that anyone will be impressed by legal briefs written as black power manifestos. But it's not as if California's government is on speaking terms with competence anyway.
Holder makes for a useful marquee name because of his Obama connection. And meanwhile California can figure out on how to spend money on everything except its actual crises.
But really nothing can top this great moment in his career.
MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry revealed to Attorney General Eric Holder that her show his nicknamed him “The Duck” and asked if he wouldn’t mind quacking for her.
“The Duck?” Holder asked, quizzically.
“We say you have a very placid, even way of presenting, but you are just working for justice underneath,” the host explained. “Would you quack for us?”
“Well, I’m not sure I’m going to do that,” the attorney general said, wisely. “But I like the analogy,” he added, saying that as an African-American man growing up in the 1950s, he had to be “cool.”
“On the surface, I’d like to think that’s the way I appear to be,” he continued. “But you’re absolutely right, those little duck feet are moving as fast as they can underneath and things are going as fast as they can behind the scenes.”
Now the Duck swims on to quack for Governor Moonbeam.