Highlights: Amy Klobuchar and Eric Holder on Justice in America

SHELBY BENZ: Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Attorney General Eric Holder joined Georgetown students and community members to participate in a virtual conversation about justice in America on June 10.

GU Politics Executive Director Mo Elleithee acknowledged that although the virtual forum had originally been designed as a conversation on voting rights, the political climate of the world has since changed, spurred by the recent deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. “We feel the ground shifting under our feet,” Elleithee said. 

Indeed, the conversation did evolve in conjunction with a drastic shift in public opinion. According to a study published by The New York Times, American voter support of the Black Lives Matter movement had increased in the first two weeks of June nearly twice as much as it had in the preceding two years. “We have a moment, right now,” said Holder. “The question is whether we can convert that moment into a movement.” 

Although senior officials of the Trump Administration have openly denied the existence of institutionalized racism in America today, Klobuchar assured that there is no doubt systemic racism continues to exist in the criminal justice system. “But it is way beyond that,” she said, voicing how disparities in economics, education, health care, and the COVID-19 crisis continue to disproportionately harm the lives of people of color. “When you have little African American kids that are in classrooms that are way too crowded, that don’t have good buildings — that’s systemic racism.” 

Both Holder and Klobuchar addressed that there is more work to be done at the national, state, and local levels of government. Echoing the verbiage of a sweeping Democratic proposal to reform policing, Klobuchar acknowledged the importance of holding police officers accountable, changing the standards of police conduct, and updating the standard from which police officers can be sued. Despite these progressive changes in the structure of the criminal justice system, Klobuchar noted that systemic issues cannot be resolved until they are recognized as economic in nature: “In these historically impoverished areas, we are never going to get out of this loop that we are in. And that’s why the bigger question of economic and racial disparities has to come into play.”

Underscoring the significance of today’s moment, Holder said, “This is going to define who you are — as a senator, congressman, governor, and mayor. Where do you stand on fundamental issues of fairness and justice?” 

Although defunding the police has been marked as a rallying cry of the BLM protestors, Holder argued that what is perhaps more implicitly fought for is a “reimagining” of ways in which the criminal justice system interacts with communities of color. “We need to come up with ways in which we define better the responsibilities we want the police to handle, and I think we also need to think about a peace dividend,” he said.

Once the conversation pivoted to voting rights, Holder spoke to the Republican Party’s resistance to vote by mail measures. In particular he focused on Georgia, accusing the state’s government of “running the system in a partisan way [that] has a negative, disproportionate impact on people of color.”

Klobuchar later addressed work on her recent vote-by-mail bill, which would allocate 3.6 billion dollars to pay for postage, envelopes, and the training of poll workers. “Not everyone’s going to cast their vote by mail as much as we want to give them the ability to do that, and we will have huge increases, like what we saw in Wisconsin.”

Holder closed the conversation with a call to action for Georgetown’s student body. “You have a lot that you have earned, and with that comes a special responsibility,” Holder said. “I am cautiously optimistic that with the involvement of young people, this nation can finally, finally live up to its founding ideals.”

Shelby Benz is a sophomore in the School of Foreign Service passionate about learning how to tackle systemic injustices through public policy and diplomacy.