If President Obama thinks he can get away with appointing an
obvious prevaricator to be Secretary of Labor – and a radical,
race-baiting one at that – he has lost all touch with reality. Even
a group as confused and fractious as the caucus of Senate
Republicans is sure to find the collective backbone to block the
(expected)
appointment of Thomas Perez.
As I
described in detail last August, Perez is one of the most
loathsome figures in the thoroughly loathsome political ranks
of Obama’s Justice Department.
He has led the administration’s racial scaremongering against
voter ID laws, but got
smacked down hard by the U.S. District Court for the D.C.
Circuit, so that
elections in South Carolina this week will go ahead with the
law in effect. (This wasn’t a partisan decision: The unanimous
three-judge panel included Clinton appointee Colleen
Kollar-Kotelly.)
Indeed, Perez doesn’t even seem to be a very good lawyer at all:
His positions also have been rebuked by courts in Arkansas (about
the Civil Rights for Institutionalized Persons Act), again in the
D.C.
District Court, in New York on an education case (U.S. v.
Brennan), in a Florida
abortion case where Perez’ team was abusively prosecuting
peaceful protesters, and most particularly in a
major Perez loss in Florida when trying to force the state
not to remove non-citizens from its voter rolls.
Perez has overseen most of the unprecedentedly
naked politicization of DoJ’s Civil Rights Division, as
detailed in an exhaustive series of reports at PJ Media. In
short, of 113 “career” (meaning supposedly apolitical)
civil-service hires for the Civil Rights Division under Obama and
(mostly) Perez, every one of those 113 were
demonstrably liberal activists. (The New York Times
effectively
confirmed this report: “None of the new hires listed
conservative organizations.”) In fact, many of them hailed from
backgrounds with outfits such as the “Intersex Society of North
America,” or wrote essays about “Genital Normalizing Surgery on
Intersexed Infants,” or fiercely advocated the “rights” of
prisoners in Arizona to perform Hawaiian chants and rituals. Since
Dec. 3, 2009, Perez has insisted on personally approving each of
these new hires.
He has aggressively continued a series of
lawsuits against various municipal police and fire departments
to try to force them to jettison written tests for membership –
including a suit against the heroic Fire Department of New York in
which the Obama team has argued in favor of what amounts to strict
racial quotas – at the expense of public safety. Amazingly
enough, Perez actually
argued that black firefighter applicants who fail 70 percent
(!!!!) of the entrance exam still be admitted to the fire
academy. This is, by the way, another case where Perez may
well be on the losing side: Last month, the Second Circuit Court of
Appeals
issued a “stay” blocking enforcement of the Perez team’s
preferred outcome that would have punished the FDNY.
Long before Perez started working for the Obama Justice
Department, he had developed a record as a radical’s radical.
Wrote
the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky:
Perez also served as president of Casa de Maryland, an extreme
advocacy organization that opposes the enforcement of our
immigration laws. This group has encouraged illegal aliens not to
speak with police officers or immigration agents; it has fought
restrictions on illegal aliens’ receiving driver’s licenses; it has
urged the Montgomery County Police Department not to enforce
federal fugitive warrants; it has advocated giving illegal aliens
in-state tuition; and it has actively promulgated “day labor”
sites, where illegal aliens and disreputable employers openly skirt
federal prohibitions on hiring undocumented individuals.
Moreover, Perez’ enthusiasm for racial quotas (or their
equivalent) has gone beyond even the traditional leftist
rationalization that quotas are needed to atone for past
discrepancies, into the hard-left realm of providing preferences
for what the Washington Times
called “other social objectives as well.”
Meanwhile, DoJ under Perez repeatedly slow-walked
efforts to help ensure that overseas military personnel have
real opportunity to exercise their voting rights – and then Perez
moved to make permanent the appointment of the official whose
incompetence or willful foot-dragging was largely responsible for
the failures. (Worse, at the same time Perez’ division was stiffing
our soldiers, it was
going overboard – without any real jurisdiction – to interfere
in each state to try to help felons regain voting privileges.)
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the little
matter of a federal judge hinting broadly that Perez may have
committed perjury when testifying that there had been no
interference by political appointees in the course of the Obama
DoJ’s decision to drop already-won voter-intimidation cases against
New Black Panthers in Philadelphia. This came after Perez
also had, apparently unlawfully, refused to honor valid subpoenas
from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights — and it was in
addition to yet another falsehood by Perez, this one to the effect
that DoJ had sought the maximum allowable penalty against the
Panthers. And it is in addition to several other of Perez’s alleged
falsehoods as recounted by noted whistleblower J. Christian Adams,
who
resigned in protest of them — most egregiously, to my mind,
when Perez wrongly denied that anybody in his division had ever
announced that Obama DoJ practice would be to avoid prosecuting
certain types of cases or enforcing certain sections of voting
laws.
While the original decision to dismiss the case pre-dated Perez’
appointment to the Justice Department, his direct involvement in,
and hands-on management of, what amounted to a cover-up of the
decision’s origins should alone be disqualifying for any Cabinet
post.
Again, the words about Perez’ dishonesty came straight from
federal judge Reggie Walton:
The documents reveal that political appointees within DOJ were
conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther
Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims
in that case, which would appear to contradict Assistant
Attorney General Perez’s testimony that political leadership
was not involved in that decision. Surely the public has an
interest in documents that cast doubt on the accuracy of government
officials’ representations regarding the possible
politicization of agency decision-making.
Thomas Perez has a record of dishonesty, radical leftism, legal
hackery, and contempt in some cases for the rule of law itself.
This man has no business heading a major Cabinet Department;
instead, he should be swiftly cashiered from all federal government
service.
