An Unfortunate Choice Of Nominee

Yesterday’s Washington Times posted an article stating that present and former justice department attorneys do not support the nomination of Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez to be secretary of labor. It seems as if some of Mr. Perez’s actions as Assistant Attorney General were not in full compliance with the law.

The article reports:

“People should be raising serious questions about this nomination,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a veteran Justice Department lawyer who formerly served as counsel to the division. “This is a man who misled both Congress and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

“He was the focus last week of the most devastating indictment of a federal government agency I have even seen,” he added, noting that the Justice Department’s office of inspector general in a 258-page report documented widespread intimidation, harassment and even threats of violence under Mr. Perez’s leadership.

 This does not sound like someone we want in charge of the Department of Labor.

This is another part of this story that is deeply troubling.  Mr. Perez intervened in a legal case involving the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The case involved St. Paul’s agreement to drop its appeal in exchange for an agreement by Justice not to join a fraud lawsuit against the city. The case had the potential to return more than $180 million in damages to the U.S. treasury.

The article reports:

They (Three House members — Rep. Darrell E. Issa, California Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee; Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; and Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, North Carolina Republican and chairman of the House Oversight financial services subcommittee) said they were “shocked to learn” that Mr. Perez — over the objections of career Justice Department attorneys — had enticed the city to drop its lawsuit that he “did not want decided by the Supreme Court.” They said Mr. Perez was concerned that a decision in the city’s favor “would dry up the massive mortgage lending settlements his division was obtaining by suing banks for housing discrimination based on disparate effects rather than any proof of intent to discriminate.”

 We have seen this problem in other areas. One of the reason that Congress has not really gone after the big banks is that the fines that can be levied against the banks for various charges are an easy flow of money into the treasury. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the ultimate source of that money is the consumer. Another reason Congress hasn’t done much about the banks is that an investigation of the bank’s roll in the 2008 collapse would also reveal the part the Congress and the Community Reinvestment Act played in the collapse.

 At any rate, Mr. Perez is not a good nominee, and his name should be withdrawn. He is another potential part of gangster government.