My article in today’s FrontPage magazine:
Radical Out, Radical In
By Matthew Vadum
President Obama is considering nominating his far-left labor secretary to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, according to media reports.
Illegal alien enabler Thomas Perez would not be an improvement over Holder, the scandal-plagued left-wing attorney general who has taken the Department of Justice to new lows of corruption and lawlessness.
Perez, who previously ran the DoJ’s civil rights branch, would likely be a Holder clone or worse.
“Perez fits all the qualities that Eric Holder had: A lack of ethics, disrespect for the rule of the law, and placing ideology first,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“Tom Perez was one of the reasons we need civil rights investigation at the civil rights division,” Fitton said. “He was the point man in terms of enforcing law in [a] racially biased manner.”
Perez hasn’t won friends outside of his radical circles during his time at the Labor Department.
“Perez has been charged with enforcing existing labor law. Unfortunately, he’s chosen only to enforce the law when it applies to employers, not to the Administration’s union allies,” according to Ryan Williams of Worker Center Watch. He continued:
While the politicization of federal agencies is running critique of the Obama administration, the Justice Department is the one agency that should remain above the fray of politics, and Perez has demonstrated that he is incapable of serving as a neutral arbiter of the law.
Patrick Semmens of the National Right to Work Foundation, said that he didn’t think Perez was capable of enforcing the law impartially.
“Tom Perez as Attorney General is a scary thought,” Semmens said. “If Perez is allowed to operate the Department of Justice the way he has run the Labor Department, he will consistently put the priorities of the president’s key political backers ahead of the rights of regular Americans.”
A former top aide to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Perez became labor secretary last year only after barely surviving a confirmation vote in the Senate. Before that he served as the nation’s top civil rights enforcer at the DoJ. Like Barack Obama, Perez graduated from Harvard Law School, long a hotbed of radical leftist activity.
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.”
Perez sides with America’s enemies in the Global War on Terror. He apparently supports Islamic terrorists and the imposition of Shariah law in America.
Perez seems to favor 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 in 2012, 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-Ariz.) 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.
Like Holder and Obama, Perez is obsessed with race.
“I wish discrimination were a thing of the past,” Perez said in 2012 when he headed the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division. “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.”
During his time at DoJ, members of the Civil Rights Division conspired with ACORN-affiliated Project Vote to weaken electoral integrity-related law enforcement. Voter ID laws, in his twisted view, are racist, calculated to deprive people of color of their voting rights.
While at DoJ, Perez led the Obama administration’s assault on voter ID laws leading up to the 2012 election. As a member of the Montgomery County, Md. Council in 2003 he tried to compel governments to accept fraud-prone matricula consular ID cards issued by Mexican consular offices.
Perez is also a past president of Casa de Maryland, a notorious advocacy group for illegal aliens funded by George Soros and the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. 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.
Under Perez, the DoJ refused to prosecute hate crimes committed against white Americans. He was reportedly instrumental in the Justice Department’s dismissal –over the objections of the government attorneys handling the matter– of a case involving two Philadelphia-based members of the New Black Panther Party who brandished weapons and intimidated white voters on Election Day 2008.
An inspector general found that Perez believed voter protection statutes “did not cover white citizens.” A House Oversight Committee investigation determined he used his private email account to do government business, a practice that allows the user to evade transparency laws. Perez was also criticized for nixing a $200 million whistle blower lawsuit because it could undermine so-called “disparate impact,” a controversial legal principle regarding discrimination.
Perez believes the government should require racial discrimination in order to benefit those the Left deems to have been historically oppressed. He favors 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.
Perez believes that medical schools should lower admission standards for black applicants because they are more likely to practice in so-called underserved communities than whites.
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.
He has targeted Maricopa County, Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio for legal harassment because he doesn’t like Arpaio’s tough-on-crime approach, especially with respect to illegal aliens.
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 openly holds business people in contempt, treating them as morally inferior. He likens bankers to Ku Klux Klan 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,” he said.
If you’re a radical leftist hellbent on fundamentally transforming America, Perez should be your choice to succeed Eric Holder as the nation’s attorney general. For the rest of America, however, Perez would be a poor pick to ensure that anything resembling justice and fairness is returned to the DoJ.