Abu Wabu

No kidding: Eric Holder has been making the rounds declaring that he is "troubled" by Arizona's illegal immigration law, and yet he yestified yesterday before a Congressional hearing that he hasn't even read the thing.

McCarthy:

He hasn’t read the Arizona immigration law, even though reading the law is the basic duty of any lawyer (let alone the U.S. Attorney General) who is called on to assess a legal situation.

Thus, he hasn’t got reasonable suspicion that Arizonans are violating the Constitution, even though reasonable suspicion is the basic investigative standard we expect law-enforcement to satisfy before officials harass Americans with stepped up scrutiny. …

If a police officer, without taking elementary investigative steps to inform himself about the facts of a situation, and thus without reasonable suspicion, simply assumed a person must be guilty of wrongdoing based on the police officer’s avowed prejudice, what would Eric Holder call it?

Ed Morrissey:

Holder certainly wouldn’t call it responsible law-enforcement. The irony is, of course, that the Arizona law doesn’t allow for profiling, and its most recent amendment removes any remaining ambiguity about when police can investigate residency status, which is when they have probable cause to hold someone on another issue. Holder’s knee-jerk reaction says plenty about bigotry, but not about people in Arizona.