Obama’s radical Labor Secretary nominee, Thomas Perez ran into another roadblock, thanks to Republicans in the Senate, Wednesday, who once again delayed a key vote on his nomination.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee was forced to push back a vote on Perez for the second time as desperate Republicans stepped up their efforts to deny him the job.
Democrats are strongly backing Perez, but Republicans, spooked by his record of far left, activist overreach at the Justice Department are doing what they can to thwart his nomination.
The Washington Times reported:
To delay the vote, Republicans invoked a rarely used rule that committees cannot start a meeting more than two hours after the Senate floor session starts for that day. Committees routinely waive the rule with consent from both parties, a Democratic Senate aide said, but Republicans would not do so Wednesday.
In late April, the committee postponed an earlier vote on Mr. Perez’s nomination as Republicans sought extra time to track down another witness.
In what will likely turn into a party-line decision, the Senate committee is now scheduled to vote May 18. If Mr. Perez, 51, is finally approved by the Democrat-controlled committee, his nomination would then go to the Senate floor, where Republicans could renew their effort to block his confirmation.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained the reason for the Republican reticence in a statement, Wednesday:
“He is a committed ideologue who appears willing, quite frankly, to say or do anything to achieve his ideological ends.
“Mr. Perez, however, does not merely push the envelope; all too often, he circumvents or ignores a law with which he disagrees.“A few examples:
“As a member of the Montgomery County Council, Mr. Perez pushed through a county policy that encouraged the circumvention of federal immigration law. Later, as head of the federal government’s top voting-rights watchdog, he refused to protect the right to vote for Americans of all races, in violation of the very law he was charged to enforce. In the same post at the Department of Justice, Mr. Perez directed the federal government to sue against the advice of career attorneys at his own office. In another case involving a Florida woman who was lawfully exercising her First Amendment right to protest an abortion clinic, the federal judge who threw out Mr. Perez’s lawsuit said he was ‘at a loss as to why the government chose to prosecute this particular case’ in the first place.
“This is what pushing the envelope means in the case of Mr. Perez: a flippant and dismissive attitude about the boundaries that everybody else has to follow for the sake of the liberal causes he believes in.
“In short, it means a lack of respect for the rule of law – and a lack of respect for the need of those in positions of power to follow it.
“Just as troubling, however, is the fact that when Mr. Perez has been called to account for his failures to follow the law, he has been less than forthright about his actions. When he testified that politics played no role in his office’s decision not to pursue charges against members of a far-left group who may have tried to prevent others from voting, for instance, the Department’s own watchdog said that ‘Perez’s testimony did not reflect the entire story,’ and a federal judge said that the evidence before him ‘appear[ed] to contradict…Perez’s testimony.’ Mr. Perez has also made misleading statements about this case, under oath, to Congress and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
“Mr. Perez’s involvement in an alleged quid pro quo deal with the City of St. Paul, Minnesota also fits the pattern. Here was a case where Mr. Perez was allegedly so concerned about a potential Supreme Court challenge to the legality of a theory he championed in housing discrimination suits known as ‘disparate impact,’ that he quietly worked out a deal with St. Paul officials whereby they’d withdraw their appeal to the Supreme Court of the disparate impact case if he arranged for the federal government to throw out two whistleblower complaints against St. Paul that could have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for taxpayers that had been falsely obtained. In the end, the two whistleblower complaints were dropped, and the Supreme Court never heard the disparate impact case. Mr. Perez has told investigators he hadn’t even heard of the disparate impact case until the Court initially decided to hear it. That’s been contradicted by HUD Deputy Assistant Secretary Sara Pratt, who told investigators she and Mr. Perez discussed the case well before that.
“Taken together, all of this paints the picture, for me at least, not of a passionate liberal who sees himself as patiently operating within the system and through the democratic process to advance a particular set of strongly held beliefs, but a crusading ideologue whose conviction about his own rightness on the issues leads him to believe the law does not apply to him. Unbound by the rules that apply to everyone else, Mr. Perez seems to view himself as free to employ whatever means at his disposal, legal or otherwise, to achieve his ideological goals.
“To say this is problematic would be an understatement.
“As Secretary of Labor, Mr. Perez would be handling numerous contentious issues and implementing many politically sensitive laws, including laws enforcing the disclosure of political activity by unions. Mr. Perez’s devotion to the cause of involuntary universal voter registration is also deeply concerning to me personally, and I would imagine many of my colleagues in the Senate also believe in the absolute centrality of maintaining the integrity of the vote.
“Americans of all political persuasions have a right to expect that the head of such a sensitive federal department, whether appointed by a Republican or a Democrat, will implement and follow the law in a fair and reasonable way.
“But I do not believe they could expect as much from Mr. Perez.”
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