As President Donald Trump continues his hopeless crusade to undo his election loss, the internet is buzzing about something else: The idea that President-elect Joe Biden should pick former President Barack Obama as U.S. Attorney General.
The idea was first floated by Columnist Douglas W. Kmiec in an oped for The Hill. After addressing the political firestorm created by Trump’s refusal to admit his defeat, Kmiec writes that “while appointing Obama certainly would be unprecedented, so is the need.”
“The fastest way to re-establish the rule of law is for Biden to nominate Obama as attorney general,” he writes. “If Biden simultaneously kept Christopher Wray as head of the FBI and made Justice’s current inspector general, Michael Horowitz, head of its Office of Legal Counsel, he would remove much division, doubt and uncertainty.”
“Will Trump yield power or won’t he? Will he continue to place his pardoned cronies above the law? Claim he can pardon himself? Continue to place his personal economic profit over national security? In the run-up to the 2016 primaries, Trump bragged that his supporters would stay loyal even if he committed a capital offense. No one expected Trump to act upon it. But a different kind of capital offense is exactly what he and a few supporters now seem to be contemplating on Jan. 6,” he continued.
“Appointing Obama certainly would be unprecedented, but so is the need. We have never had a former president take on the leadership of an executive department for a successor president, but nothing precludes it, save, possibly, Michelle Obama. We must leave those domestic relations to the former president — but he has the intelligence, youth and character to do the job. Besides, it’s perfect preparation for subsequent additional public service on the Supreme Court.”
Read the entire oped here.
