Freedom Line Blog

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who did yeoman’s work in helping expose the racialist agenda of the Holder Justice Department and especially its Civil Rights Division under Thomas Perez, has now come out with a scathing letter expressing serious reservations about Barack Obama’s nomination of Perez to be Secretary of Labor.

Kirsanow writes that the nomination “merits extremely close scrutiny by senators from both parties, for several concerns about Perez’s record as head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice transcend partisanship and ideology.”

And:

The Civil Rights Division refused to answer 18 separate interrogatories pertaining to the substance of the [New Black Panther voter intimidation] case. The Division also failed to provide witness statements for 12 key witnesses and refused to respond to 22 requests for production of documents. Further, DOJ barred two Civil Rights Division attorneys from testifying before the Commission (the two later defied the Department and testified at considerable risk to their professional careers). The Department refused to turn over a number of requested documents, asserting a variety of specious privileges. In response, the Commission requested a privilege log, i.e., a list of those documents DOJ maintained were protected by privilege and therefore not subject to production. DOJ failed to produce such a log.

After a lawsuit finally forced production of the log, the record was such that,

As Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia diplomatically stated in his opinion, DOJ’s internal documents “appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General Perez’s testimony [before the Commission] that political leadership was not involved” in the decision to dismiss the NBPP case.

After detailing even more concerns about Perez, Kirsanow concluded: “All of these things should be of tremendous concern to all senators, regardless of party, when considering the president’s choice of Thomas Perez for labor secretary. They should, at minimum, be the subjects of extensive questioning of the nominee.”

The battle over Perez’ nomination promises to be very contentious, indeed.

At The American Spectator today, I detail in exhaustive fashion the outlandish record of Justice Department official Thomas Perez, who is rumored to be President Obama’s choice to be Secretary of Labor. At NRO, the incomparable Peter Kirsanow provides even more details on an important aspect of that record.

Here’s part of Kirsanow’s:

The Civil Rights Division refused to answer 18 separate interrogatories pertaining to the substance of the NBPP case. The Division also failed to provide witness statements for twelve key witnesses and refused to respond to 22 requests for production of documents. Further, DOJ barred two Civil Rights Division attorneys from testifying before the commission (the two later defied the department and testified at considerable risk to their professional careers).

Here’s part of mine:

Perez has overseen most of the unprecedentedly naked politicizationof DoJ’s Civil Rights Division, as detailed in an exhaustive series of reports at PJ Media. In short, of 113 “career” (meaning supposedly apolitical) civil-service hires for the Civil Rights Division under Obama and (mostly) Perez, every one of those 113 weredemonstrably liberal activists. (The New York Times effectivelyconfirmed this report: “None of the new hires listed conservative organizations.”) In fact, many of them hailed from backgrounds with outfits such as the “Intersex Society of North America,” or wrote essays about “Genital Normalizing Surgery on Intersexed Infants,” or fiercely advocated the “rights” of prisoners in Arizona to perform Hawaiian chants and rituals. Since Dec. 3, 2009, Perez has insisted on personally approving each of these new hires.

He has aggressively continued a series of lawsuits against various municipal police and fire departments to try to force them to jettison written tests for membership – including a suit against the heroic Fire Department of New York in which the Obama team has argued in favor of what amounts to strict racial quotas – at the expense of public safety. Amazingly enough, Perez actually arguedthat black firefighter applicants who fail 70 percent (!!!!) of the entrance exam still be admitted to the fire academy.

From what I hear, more on Perez, quite devastating, might be coming out as early as this afternoon.

The always thoughtful, always interesting former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama has a superb essay on affirmative action, in response to the Supreme Court announcing it will hear a new case challenging race-based admissions. Davis is more in the middle on the issue than I am — I am dead set against using race as a factor in any way, pro or con, because I believe in absolute legal color-blindness — but he does make good points to the effect that the lack of ANY racial consciousness probably would have the short-term effect, at some schools, of a lower rate of black admissions and enrollments.

One thing he missed, though, is the strong evidence that black students, or any students for that matter, admitted to more competitive institutions than they otherwise would qualify for tend, in turn, to fail at higher rates — whereas if they went to slightly less competitive institutions, they succeed, and end up better off in the long run. In fact, in the Texas case heading to the Supreme Court, three members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Gail Heriot, Peter Kirsanow, Todd Gaziano) make that point exactly.

Without discussing that point, though, Davis still notes that there are plenty of less competitive, but perfectly competent schools, that will indeed take students turned down by, say, the Ivy League schools, and then writes:

But the reflexive instinct that ending race conscious college admissions is a disaster in the making? It’s no longer a serious claim. Even a full-scale retreat would hardly disenfranchise African American students or consign them to sub-par schools that lack adequate resources. The market of higher education is much too robust for that. 

This is great stuff. Conservatives do need to recognize that it is important, in one way or another, to ensure that opportunities are not closed, for cultural or whatever other reasons, to black Americans. (Other reasons might include semi-legitimate practices such as preferences for “legacy” candidates.) Those of us who oppose affirmative action should always keep in mind that even if racism isn’t at work, black Americans proportionately do seem to suffer from fewer opportunities, in practice, than white ones. This doesn’t mean the law should discriminate in their favor, but it does mean the culture still needs work.

Meanwhile, let’s hope the high court does the right thing and strikes down the racial preferences in Texas…..

Peter Kirsanow catches Barack Obama calling himself irresponsible and unpatriotic.  Heh, heh.

Of course, it really galls me when the left yells and screams about conservatives accusing them of being unpatriotic, even when we’ve done no such thing, while they actually use that very word to describe us again and again. Oh, well…. Let them be hoist by their own petard.