By James Bovard

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is not missing any chance to condemn Republicans for threatening to censor libraries and school textbooks. But she is overlooking the heavy-handed record of her chief spokesperson, Brian Fallon. Unfortunately, a recent Supreme Court decision opens the floodgates for far more federal censorship.

When Fallon was press chief at the Justice Department in 2015, he was outraged at my USA Today op-eds bashing Attorney General Eric Holder, including “Eric Holder’s Lawless Legacy,” [Feb. 3, 2015] and “Eric Holder’s Police Shooting Record? Dismal,” [Aug. 20, 2014]. I thumped Holder for championing “a Nixonian-style legal philosophy that presumed that any action the president orders is legal” (the same point that President Biden is using nowadays to condemn Donald Trump).

Holder championed Barack Obama’s power to assassinate people — including Americans — solely based on the president’s secret decrees. On March 6, 2012, Holder defended presidentially ordered killings: “Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process; it does not guarantee judicial process.” TV comedian Stephen Colbert mocked Holder: “Trial by jury; trial by fire; rock, paper, scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do.” For Holder and the Obama administration, reciting certain legal phrases in secret memos was all it took to justify extrajudicial executions.

Holder insisted that drone attacks “are not [assassinations], and the use of that loaded term is misplaced; assassinations are unlawful killings … the........

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