Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
knows the instincts of anti-business activists as well as anyone.
And his advice to corporate leaders who contemplate buying off
their tormentors is this: Don’t. Political bribery won’t work,
except maybe in the short run.
“A lot of companies think that by admitting their failures to
accusers, they can buy peace,” he said at a conference last
November co-organized by his group, the National Legal and Policy
Center and the Free Enterprise Education Institute. “Many
corporations admit in effect, ‘We know we’re slimy. But we’re going
to set aside some of our ill-gotten gains for good purposes.’” Too
often, “good purposes” tend to be organizations threatening to sue
or boycott them to advance their own anti-business goals.
Companies such as Toyota and Pepsico for years have elevated to
a virtual art form the practice of buying off hard-Left plaintiffs
and protesters. You can add Anheuser-Busch to the list. The Mexican
American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, indicates
Anheuser-Busch in a recent annual report as a “Partner.” That means
that it donated at least $100,000, hardly pocket change.
A company the size of Anheuser-Busch, one would think, would
orient its philanthropic giving toward organizations supportive of
its interests: namely, boosting beer sales and strengthening free
enterprise as a whole. MALDEF, to make a long story short, is not
such an organization. For nearly 40 years it has waged a ceaseless
battle to create what amounts to unofficial Mexican ethnic
principalities on U.S. soil, blocking immigration reform, promoting
linguistic separatism, and increasing government public-assistance
spending on Hispanics. Such wish-list items are not good for
any company’s bottom line, never mind
Anheuser-Busch’s.
MALDEF, as its name implies, files lawsuits — lots of them. And
the last thing the group’s leaders want to see is someone sitting
on the U.S. Supreme Court predisposed toward making deportations
easier, striking down mandatory bilingual education, or preventing
issuance of driver’s licenses as IDs to illegal immigrants — in
other words, opposing the sorts of things MALDEF advocates.
In Judge Samuel A. Alito, now facing long-awaited Senate
confirmation hearings, MALDEF has such an opponent. Alito, having
served 15 years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Third
Circuit, has left a modest-sized paper trail suggesting as
much.
MALDEF, let us understand, plays to win. And win it often does.
Over the years the organization has filed successful suits to
mandate affirmative-action hiring in Denver public schools, force
employers to refrain from requiring Hispanic employees to speak
English on the job, and require Virginia public colleges and
universities to accept illegal immigrant students at in-state
tuition.
Alito’s presence on the Supreme Court could derail some of these
victories. Let’s take a brief look at his track record.
IN 1994, IN Tipu v. INS, two fellow Circuit
judges threw out a deportation order against a Pakistani immigrant
convicted on a drug conspiracy charge. The plaintiff, they
reasoned, had played only a minor role in the crime, and had earned
a high school diploma while serving a light prison sentence. Alito
dissented, arguing the immigration review board did not act
arbitrarily.
Another 1994 Third Circuit ruling, Pemberthy v.
Beyer, particularly sticks in MALDEF’s craw. Judge Alito,
writing for the majority, upheld the state prosecution’s peremptory
challenges to five Spanish-speaking jurors. In that case, two men,
Gabriel Pemberthy and Rigoberto Moncada, had been under
investigation by New Jersey authorities for involvement in
Colombian cocaine trafficking. They subsequently were convicted,
and lost on appeal.
Pemberthy and Moncada then petitioned for a federal review,
arguing that dismissing Latino jurors for being fluent in Spanish
was tantamount to treating ethnicity as an illegal classification
under the Equal Protection Clause. A U.S. District Court agreed,
and overturned the decision.
Alito in turn voted to reverse that ruling. He understood that
an ability to speak Spanish per se is no basis for exclusion. But
this was an unusual case. Wiretapped evidence, in Spanish and of a
highly cryptic nature, had been gathered by Spanish-speaking law
enforcement officers. Alito believed that the stricken jurors, in
this instance, could be prone to willfully misinterpreting tapes
played back in court. As the prosecution had not violated the Equal
Protection Clause, the appeals court restored the convictions.
The wording of Alito’s majority opinion made clear race was
not at issue. He wrote: “A challenger’s decision to strike
jurors based on language ability is subject to rational basis
review if and only if the challenger’s concerns have to do with
language rather than ethnicity. The dispositive question is the
factual question of subjective intent.”
No matter — this decision, among others, has prompted MALDEF’s
president and general counsel, Ann Marie Tallman, to denounce
Alito’s nomination. His views, she states, reveal “a disturbing
pattern of insensitivity toward Latinos’ lives and a pattern of
legal opinions that would… dismantle fundamental constitutional
protections currently enjoyed by Latinos and all Americans.” His
opinions would “roll back the clock on civil rights protections
available to Latinos.”
Her group accuses Alito of hostility toward immigrants. That’s
an odd claim to direct at someone whose late father, Samuel Alito,
Sr., was an Italian immigrant.
LET’S CUT THROUGH the multicultural pieties. Judge Alito’s
“insensitivity” is rooted in a sound belief that anyone who resides
in America must do so legally, that an ability to speak English is
essential to a person’s daily functioning here.
It’s a position that needs no defense. In 2005 more than 35
million immigrants live in this country, roughly a third of them
illegally, according to an analysis by the Center for Immigration
Studies. Mexico is the sending nation for slightly over 30 percent
of all new arrivals, double its share in 1980. And the problem of
illegal entry from Mexico remains severe, despite a tripling in
Border Patrol strength over the past decade.
Through lawsuits and public-relations campaigns, MALDEF helped
bring about this situation. The group is candid about wanting to
transform Mexican-Americans into a powerful voting bloc for
cultural separatism. Don’t be misled by the fact that most
immigration still originates from outside Mexico. High levels of
immigration, and high resistance to assimilation, whatever one’s
country of origin, strengthen Mexican interests by weakening
American sovereignty.
Anheuser-Busch, along with more modest donors to MALDEF such as
Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Citigroup, and Toyota, don’t quite see things
this way. Fearful of becoming targets of boycotts or lawsuits, they
have responded by unceasingly promoting affirmative action,
regardless of shareholder wishes.
Last September 20, NLPC President Peter Flaherty wrote a letter
to Anheuser-Busch President and CEO Patrick T. Stokes, criticizing
his company’s $100,000-plus donation to MALDEF, at the time
opposing Supreme Court Chief Justice nominee John Roberts. Jesus
Rangel, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president for sales development and
community relations, replied two weeks later: “While we may not
always agree with MALDEF’s position on every issue, we strongly
support MALDEF’s past, present, and future efforts in regard to
protecting and promoting civil rights in the Latino community.”
Do Stokes, Rangel, and other Anheuser-Busch officials actually
believe that a large donation to a nonprofit pressure group
translates into higher sales of Budweiser and Michelob to
Hispanics? It would seem that way.
MALDEF can count on continued support from such corporations,
ever sensitive to the slightest tarnishing of their good-citizen
image. Rare indeed these days is the CEO who doesn’t
timorously trumpet his company’s “commitment to diversity.” By
contrast, Judge Alito poses an obstacle to the advance of radical
Mexican-separatism. That’s why MALDEF is a major player in the
campaign to deny him a seat on the Supreme Court.
