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Former Attorney General Eric Holder doesn’t mince words. When he joined At Our Table, he made it clear that the erosion of democratic norms isn’t abstract. It’s happening right in front of us.
He started with a simple but sobering reminder about what independence once meant at the Department of Justice.
“When you become attorney general, there’s a distance that you have to put between yourself and the president that you serve. The Justice Department has an awesome amount of power, and those determinations have to be made on the facts and on the law and without any kind of political consideration.”
That distance, he warned, is disappearing with the current administration.
“This is a Justice Department that [currently] thinks of itself as the lawyers for the president as opposed to the lawyers for the people of this country… When that line gets blurred, that is a problematic thing for our nation and for our democracy.”
From there, our conversation ranged from leadership under pressure to the moments that reveal how fragile institutions really are. Attorney General Holder pointed out how the public—and Congress—used to respond when presidents crossed the line.
“If this had been Ronald Reagan talking to Ed Meese or George W. Bush talking to Al Gonzalez the media would have covered this in an appropriate way—which is to say, what the hell is going on here? Instead, we’ve seen a Congress that has simply been supine, and a media that has been a little too accepting of that which is totally abnormal.”
When we turned to his work with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and gerrymandering—what he calls “an attack on our democracy”—Attorney General Holder didn’t hold back.
“Since 2011, Republicans have really focused on gerrymandering as a way to hold on to power that they cannot earn in fair elections… That’s what led to the formation of the NDRC in 2017. We’re looking for fairness. I’ve taken on Democrats who have tried to gerrymander, too.”
We lightened things up a little when he shared his Sit Your Ass Down Award. He gave lifetime achievement honors to Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Stephen Miller before giving this episode’s nod to FCC commissioner Brandon Carr for, as Attorney General Holder put it, “doing a whole bunch of things inconsistent with the responsibilities he has.”
If we’re serious about restoring trust in our government, we have to start by protecting the rules that make trust possible—from fair maps to fair justice. That’s not partisanship. That’s democracy maintenance.
— Jaime
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