Obama's bad choice for Labor Department

Doug Ross:

Thomas "New Black Panthers" Perez is Eric Holder's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and President Obama's current nominee for Secretary of Labor. The President of Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, has been on Perez like white on rice.

 Of Perez, Fitton says, "[He] has shown a glaring inability to follow his sworn duties to tell the truth and dispassionately apply the basic constitutional tenet of equal justice under law."

“Time and again in recent years, Judicial Watch has exposed Mr. Perez’s repeated attempts to undermine those seeking to assure that the laws of the land are applied equally to those of all races. Mr. Perez’s attacks on election integrity measures such as voter ID were so far off base that he helped the DOJ earn a reputation as a partisan campaign arm for the Obama reelection campaign.

“As Secretary of Labor, Mr. Perez would be in a position to push policies broadly discriminate against American workers who failed to meet his own, thoroughly racialist worldview. Furthermore, based upon his relentless record both in and out of government, there can be little doubt that he would continue to put his personal preference for illegal immigrants above the rights of all workers of any race to equal employment opportunity.

“Mr. Perez is a terrible, hyper-partisan choice for Labor Secretary. Honest Democrats and Republicans who want the Labor Department to be run well should look skeptically at his nomination.”

 ...Documents obtained from the Obama Department of Justice in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit directly contradicted sworn testimony by Perez before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that no political leadership was involved in the DOJ decision to abandon its own voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The Black Panther Party had been charged with threatening and intimidating white voters outside a Philadelphia polling station on Election day 2008. 

In July 2012, Judicial Watch obtained a ruling in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that Perez had, indeed, lied under oath about the involvement of “political leadership” in the DOJ decision. In the ruling, Judge Reggie B. Walton declared:

“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.”

 The DOJ’s Office of Inspector General recently released a report entitled “A Review of the Operations of the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division,” which confirms the court’s ruling: “We believe that these facts evidence ‘involvement’ in the decision by political appointees within the ordinary meaning of that word,” and that Perez’s statements, “did not capture the full extent of that involvement.” The report also documents that Perez does not believe in the race-neutral application of certain civil rights laws.
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There is much more.

Perez also engaged in what looks like unethical dealings with teh City of St. Paul to thwart a Supreme Court review of his use of "disparate impact" rulings to force agreements that are of questionable validity with government and business entities that favor minorities over a fair application of standards and the law.  His nomination should be rejected.