Former Attorney General Holder says doing big things is what makes USA exceptional

This country is defined by doing big things, like the FDR-era New Deal, the interstate highway system, and the Great Society, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told a National Press Club Headliners Book Event May 12, 2022. "We do big, that is what makes us exceptional," he said. Some people even say the ideas in his co-written book, Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote, are too big, he told the audience in the Fourth Estate room at the Club.

Holder co-wrote the book with New York Times best-selling author Sam Koppelman, who also was at the event and helped take questions after the discussion, all of which was moderated by Club Secretary Mike Balsamo of the Associated Press

Holder said the country has made great progress toward equality. He said his father, in military uniform, was denied service at places of business, but then his son became a U.S. attorney general. And he said progress did not just happen, it took work by many people.

He sees the current attack on voting rights in this country as the strongest since the Jim Crow era. In the book, he presents two proposals to counter this problem. First, make voting easier. He said he realizes some say we should make voting harder, to test people. Second, he wants to see reform in three institutions: the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Senate.

Holder said that the Electoral College has given us two presidents in the past two decades who lost the popular vote. He supports the move of some states to give their electoral votes to the candidate who received the largest number of popular votes.

He said the Supreme Court has been compromised by two “stolen seats.” He proposes term limits of 18 years for justices, and that it be directed that every president will nominate a new justice in the first and third years of their term. He said that under this proposal, the high court eventually would settle back down to nine justices, as the nine sitting on the court when the proposition goes into effect would start reach their term limits.

He said a 50-50 Senate does not reflect the votes received by the two political parties, though he realizes that changing the Senate would require a constitutional amendment and that is unlikely to happen. He proposes that Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico be admitted as states to make the Senate representation better.

Holder and Koppelman responded to a question about gerrymandering. They talked about some examples and said speaking out is one way to counter the practice, which redraws boundaries of voting constituencies to give an advantage for certain interests. They discussed one black college that was split down the middle by a gerrymandering action. They said you wake up in your dorm in one district and attend your first class of the day in anther district. This was changed when a student went out and drew a line showing the split. That got people's attention.

Asked about Shelby County v. Holder, which declared Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, Holder said Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the country has changed since the Voting Rights Law was written. He said he agrees that the country has changed, but not so much that that part of the act was no longer needed.

In response to a question about trust in the election process, he said it is “nonsense” to claim the last presidential election was rigged. He said that there is no proof of voter fraud. He said we must counter the “Big Lie.”