Free Republic

A catalog of government lawlessness is more discomforting to contemplate when the catalog is contemporary. We are all familiar with tales of mischief, corruption and abuse of power from other ages and in other places. We call it history. But the new book Obama’s Enforcer by Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund documents the rank lawlessness that has saturated Eric Holder’s Justice Department, and thus, the Obama presidency. Von Spakovsky and Fund’s book releases June 10. It details the radical nest that the Justice Department has become. Their book echoes what I still hear from Justice Department employees across...

In 1994, Barack Obama taught a course at the University of Chicago Law School entitled, "Current Issues in Racism and the Law." The reading list and syllabus for that class were made available by the New York Times in 2008, though there seems to have been little analysis of its content by Jodi Kantor, the Times’s Obama correspondent. Obama routinely assigned works by Bell as required reading, including Bell's racialist interpretations of seminal civil rights laws and cases. No other scholar’s work appears as often in the syllabus as Bell’s does.

  Obama has unwittingly made his real beliefs clear. From time to time, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas have naturally talked about growing up African-American under far less tolerant conditions than those we take for granted today. Yet their biggest contributions to American race relations have been their admirable abilities to transcend such racial intolerance — to make being black incidental, not essential, at least in public, to their sterling characters and impressive achievements. They all paid a price for emphasizing individuality rather than adhering to identity politics. Those on the left often criticized them as somehow inauthentic,...