Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says President Barack Obama’s Attorney General nominee, Loretta Lynch, is unfit to be the nation’s top lawyer because of her support for executive amnesty and other positions she’s taken, the governor’s spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski tells Breitbart News.
“Given Loretta Lynch’s failure to commit to protect Americans from the president’s lawless executive overreach, that even he said nearly two dozen times, she is not fit to serve as the nation’s Attorney General,” Kukowski said in an email.
Walker is in New Hampshire, the first in the nation primary state, on Friday, meeting with — among others — former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA)—who narrowly lost to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) in the general election last year.
While Walker doesn’t have a vote in the U.S. Senate, his public opposition to Lynch’s nomination could have massive implications as the vote heads to the Senate floor next week. Even the four Republicans who have stated they intend to support Lynch—Sens. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Susan Collins (R-ME)—might not want to oppose Walker’s position, along with the position of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the 2008 GOP presidential nominee.
Walker is polling at or near the top of most early presidential polls after an explosive entrance onto the national political stage in January with a speech to the Iowa Freedom Summit hosted by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Citizens United in Des Moines. He’s been hiring up key staff and touring early presidential states while quickly getting more involved in national political battles, and is emerging—along with Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX)—as one of the credible Republican alternatives to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the GOP presidential primaries for 2016.
Bush has not taken a position on Lynch’s nomination at this time, and a spokesman for him told Breitbart News he’d check with the governor on the matter but hasn’t gotten back before publication of this story.
Both Cruz and Paul are very publicly opposed to Lynch as the successor to Eric Holder as Obama’s attorney general.
“For several months now, I have called on the Senate majority leader to halt confirmations of every nominee executive and judicial, other than vital national security positions, unless or until the president rescinds his unconstitutional amnesty,” Cruz told Politico in an interview recently. “We have an opportunity in front of us right now with Loretta Lynch — a nominee for attorney general — who has fully embraced and flat-out promised to implement the unconstitutional amnesty.”
Paul has publicly said he’s opposed to Lynch too, first coming out against her in an interview on Greta Van Susteren’s program on Fox News. “Oh, she’s going down,” Paul said in his U.S. Senate office earlier in the day while this reporter was present when his staff was briefing him for that interview.