In a report on Attorney General Eric Holder’s approach to seeking the death penalty, NPR reports:

A few months after Holder made that statement, he authorized a capital prosecution in Vermont, a state that does not have the death penalty. When Ashcroft brought a federal death penalty case in Vermont seven years ago, the mayor of Burlington called it “an affront to states’ rights” and “not consistent with the values of a majority of Vermonters.” But this time, there was hardly any outcry.

So the former antiwar movement doesn’t complain about President Obama’s expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And opponents of capital punishment don’t protest the Obama administration’s seeking the death penalty in liberal Vermont. It’s beginning to look a lot like the Bush years, when conservatives put up with a great deal from a Republican administration that would have sent them into apoplexy if it had been done by Democrats.