Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch by any account has the highest legal and educational pedigree imaginable to succeed Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General. In fact, from the first moment that her name was dropped weeks ago as a possible replacement for Holder, the accolades were non-stop about her accomplishments prosecuting an assortment of crooked politicians, drug cartel heads, terror suspects, and most importantly, winning a conviction against the New York cops that beat and sodomized Haitian emigrant Abner Louima in 1997.
An added plus is that she can’t be tagged as one of Obama’s inner circle cronies, as the GOP repeatedly slandered Holder.
In the mold of Holder she’s been outspoken that a lock em’ up and throw the key away approach to crime fighting won’t work, especially when those who are most likely to have the key thrown away on them are young black males. Lynch went even further in February 2013 and told a symposium on “Smart Justice: Changing How We Think About Crime and Punishment” at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City that simply dumping more young black males in jail cells is a vicious cycle that insures they have nowhere to go and no support to break the crime and arrest cycle.
But that forward thinking and her impeccable legal credentials and unsullied political ties are likely to count far less if the GOP is tempted to use her as yet another one of their foils to hammer Obama. The first light hint that the GOP may well be poised to follow this well-worn script came from GOP Senators Chuck Grassley and Ted Cruz, both of whom sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee. They were peeved that Obama would tap Lynch when many Democrats are lame ducks, and thus not giving the incoming wave of GOP Senate members a chance to have their say on Lynch.
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