Tom Perez: Obama’s Radical Labor Secretary Nominee

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama intends to nominate in-your-face radical lawyer Thomas Perez as his next Secretary of Labor, according to media reports.

Now an assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, Perez is a former top aide to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and possibly a perjurer, which makes him a perfect fit for the ethically-challenged Obama cabinet.

If confirmed, Perez would replace Hilda Solis, a former Democratic congresswoman from Los Angeles who resigned in January.

Solis treated the Labor Department as an arm of the labor movement and business as an enemy, not a partner in creating jobs. She also discarded Bush era transparency rules that fought union corruption.

What would Perez be like as labor secretary?

He told AFL-CIO leaders that if Martin Luther King were alive today, “He would join with you … in calling for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act” — legislation that would drastically tilt workplace elections in favor of labor. He said the “civil rights movement and the labor movement are … essentially the same.”

At DOJ, Perez led the Obama administration’s assault on voter ID laws last year.  As John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky report in Who’s Counting, as a member of the Montgomery County, MD Council in 2003 he also tried to force governments to accept fraud-prone matricula consular ID cards issued by Mexican consular offices.

Perez was also president of Casa de Maryland, a notorious advocacy group for illegal aliens funded by George Soros and the soon-to-be laminated Hugo Chavez. (Big donors to Casa de Maryland include Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society –$270,000 since 2010– National Council of La Raza –$70,000 since 2004– and two government-supported entities, Neighborhood Reinvestment Corp. –$40,000 since 2011– and Maryland Legal Services Corp. –$630,203 since 2005.)

Perez apparently favors Saudi-style anti-blasphemy laws. In Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries offenders are condemned to death merely for insulting Islam.

Disturbingly, at a congressional hearing Perez pointedly refused to rule out bringing such laws to America. At a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee’s panel on the Constitution last summer, Perez would not say whether he would uphold the religious speech protections in the First Amendment in the future.

“Will you tell us … that this administration’s Department of Justice will never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against any religion?” Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) asked four times to no avail.

Perez, like so many Obama administration officials, believes that America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the Muslim religion. He has worked with hardcore Islamist groups such as the terrorist-linked Islamic Society of North America and applauded Islamists for lobbying against airline security measures.

He played a major role in enacting the Church Arson Prevention Act, legislation based on the false premise that black churches were being targeted with disproportionate frequency by arsonists.

Perez, now nominally the nation’s top civil rights enforcer at the Department of Justice, has an appalling track record at the DOJ and myriad unsavory associations.

He has targeted Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio, for legal harassment because he doesn’t like Arpaio’s tough-on-crime approach, especially with respect to illegal aliens.

Under Perez, the DOJ has refused to prosecute hate crimes committed against white Americans. He was reportedly instrumental in the Justice Department’s dismissal of a case involving two Philadelphia-based members of the New Black Panther Party who intimidated white voters on Election Day 2008.

Perez graduated from Harvard Law School, long a hotbed of radical leftist activity. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) recently irritated left-wingers when an old speech of his surfaced in which he pointed out that Harvard Law is filled with what he called “communists.”

Cruz, of course, was correct.  Harvard Law is bursting with adherents of “Critical Legal Studies” which is a crude legal theory derived from Marxism.

Perez is on record favoring the use of affirmative action in hiring at higher education and healthcare facilities. Perez appeared to argue that medical doctors should push for racial quotas in the hiring process because racial diversity among physicians somehow improves healthcare outcomes.

Likewise, Perez also believes that medical schools should also lower admission standards for black applicants because they are more likely to practice in so-called underserved communities than whites, notes author David Limbaugh.

Perez is proud of his role in inflating the mortgage bubble. He’s a fierce defender of financial affirmative action programs that forced banks to lend money to uncreditworthy borrowers.

Perez likens bankers to KKK members, arguing that racial discrimination is afoot whenever a member of a minority group is turned down for a loan. The only difference between bankers and Klansmen is that bankers discriminate “with a smile” and “fine print,” but they are “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in the neighborhood,” Perez said.

As NPR reported a year ago, Perez said, “I wish discrimination were a thing of the past. I wish we were living in post-racial America. I wish my phone were not ringing. But regrettably, it’s ringing off the hook in the voting context. It’s ringing off the hook in the hate crimes context and in so many other contexts.”

As director of clinical law programs at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, in 2003 Perez whined about the difficulty he claimed illegal aliens and new legal immigrants have getting welfare benefits. “Many people remain eligible for S-CHIP and Medicaid who don’t get access because of language barriers,” he said.

Just another day in the Obama administration.