Senate confirmation hearings put nominees on notice that, as a Michigan state legislator reportedly once said, “I’m watching everything you do with a fine-toothed comb.” Loretta Lynch, a talented lawyer and seasoned U.S. attorney, should be confirmed as attorney general. Her hearing, however, should not be perfunctory. Questions like the following would highlight some festering problems:
• The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights uses the threat of withdrawing federal funding to coerce colleges and universities into jettisoning crucial defendants’ protections when adjudicating, in improvised tribunals, accusations of sexual assault. Presumption of innocence? The new presumption is that accusations are valid until disproved. The right to confront one’s accuser? No, it would be traumatizing to the “survivor” (note the prejudgment). Proof beyond a reasonable doubt? Now a mere “preponderance of the evidence” will suffice. Are you comfortable with this traducing of due process?
• What about the promiscuous use of long-term solitary confinement in prisons? Given its deranging effects, does this practice constitute torture as defined by federal law?
• The scandal of prison rape persists. When will the government stop this crime against inmates in its custody?
• The U.S. incarceration rate is five times Wales and England’s, nine times Germany’s, 14 times Japan’s. In 2010, more than 200,000 inmates were over the age of 50. How can this be necessary?
• The number of drug offenders in federal prisons is 20 times the number in 1980, and accounts for more than half of our federal mass incarceration. The “war on drugs” is horrendously expensive and hardly effective. Is it time to consider decriminalizing some controlled substances?
• In California, approximately 2,000 persons who have committed no violent or otherwise serious crime are serving 25 years to life under the state’s “three strikes and you’re out” law. It mandates such sentences for any third felony. Do you think that mandatory — and often draconian — minimum sentences prevent judges from judging? And that the threat of such sentences, by extorting guilty pleas, can vitiate the right to a trial?
• The Justice Department has been unhelpful regarding attempts to fully investigate and properly punish the politicization and corruption of the IRS. Given the department’s seeming complicity in the cover-up, would it not be appropriate to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS practice of suppressing the political activity of conservative groups?
• Civil forfeiture — the seizure of property suspected of being produced by, or involved with, crime — has become a lucrative business for lawless law enforcement. Civil forfeiture treats citizens worse than criminals, seizing the property of persons neither convicted of nor even indicted for a crime. Do you agree that this practice often is indistinguishable from robbery?
• Many progressives say that the 34 states that have passed laws requiring voters to have a government-issued photo ID are practicing “vote suppression.” Does requiring a photo ID at airports constitute “travel suppression”?
