Obama to nominate Thomas Perez as labor secretary
This is the way the MSM is portraying Tom Perez. They leave out his bias of supporting illegal aliens over US citizens and his obvious ethnic bias. JMO
Obama to nominate Thomas Perez as labor secretary
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By Sari Horwitz and Lena H. Sun, Updated: Saturday, March 9,
Thomas E. Perez, the likely nominee to be the next secretary of labor, was introduced to organized labor under traumatic circumstances.
Perez was 12 when his father died of a heart attack, and a friend’s father stepped in as a surrogate. The man was a Teamster who’d lost his job, and the union helped support him.
Perez never forgot.
Now, Perez, 51, a first-generation Dominican American, is in line to lead the Department of Labor. President Obama plans to nominate Perez, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, to be labor secretary, according to two people in the administration familiar with the decision.
White House officials declined to comment on Perez or the nominating process.
Perez has strong labor support and served as Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s (D) labor secretary from 2007 until 2009, when he was tapped for the Justice Department position. Perez, a longtime Takoma Park resident, also served on the Montgomery County Council and was the first Latino elected to the council. He has been the key official under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. handling civil rights cases, the centerpiece of what Holder hopes will be his legacy.
Reached by telephone Saturday, Perez said: “I can’t really discuss it, I apologize.”
Perez would replace Hilda L. Solis, who resigned in January. If nominated and confirmed, he would satisfy requests from Latino groups for representation in Obama’s second-term Cabinet.
Friends and colleagues say Perez has gained a unique perspective from working in federal, state and local government. “That is a very good range of experiences, a lot of perspective to see government at all those different angles,” said Ronald Weich, a former assistant attorney general for legislative affairs and now dean of the University of Baltimore’s law school.
But Perez’s possible nomination, which must be confirmed by the Senate, was already drawing criticism from one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa). In a statement, Grassley said that if Perez is nominated, “he should face a lot of tough questions” about the Justice Department’s role in a decision last year by St. Paul, Minn., to withdraw a housing discrimination case that was before the Supreme Court.
On civil rights, Perez’s division oversaw voting rights cases against South Carolina and Texas. The Justice Department blocked a law in Texas last year that required voters to show a photo ID, following similar action in December 2011 to block a voter ID law in South Carolina. Both states filed lawsuits in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to overturn the federal action. The court struck down the Texas voter ID law and approved the South Carolina law, but ordered it delayed until at least this year.
The Civil Rights Division also conducted 17 probes of police and sheriff’s departments, the most in its 54-year history.
One of them involved America’s self-proclaimed toughest sheriff, Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County. The Justice department sued him, his office and the county last year for civil rights violations after months of negotiations failed to yield an agreement to settle allegations that his department racially profiled Latinos in immigration patrols.
Hilary O. Shelton, director of the Washington bureau of the NAACP, said Perez “has been one of the most irrepressible forces fighting for civil rights in decades.”
Perez has spent nearly his entire career in public service. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he clerked for a federal judge in Colorado and then worked as a prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division, handling some of the department’s most high-profile civil rights cases.
Weich, his Justice Department colleague, said he invited Perez to speak to law students recently. Asked to talk about his different jobs, Perez “spoke most passionately about his time in local government,” Weich said.
Perez once said he’d dreamed of elective office since his childhood in Buffalo, where he grew up as the youngest of five brothers and sisters.
He was teaching at the University of Maryland School of Law when he decided to run in the 2002 Democratic primary for the Montgomery council. He wooed Latino immigrants and other minorities in District 5, an increasingly diverse area spanning parts of Silver Spring, Kensington, Wheaton and Takoma Park, where Perez moved in 1995.
He became just the second minority ever to be elected to the nine-person council.
“He’s very passionate about what he believes in; he pushed his ideas very forcefully,” said Douglas M. Duncan, who was Montgomery County executive during Perez’s council stint.
Perez pushed a “bill of rights” for domestic workers, tried to toughen county laws against predatory lending and supported the expansion of medical clinics to serve the uninsured. He also fought to import cheaper prescription drugs for county employees — a plan blocked by the Food and Drug Administration.
In 2005, Perez became council president and the state’s highest-ranking Latino elected official. The following year, he entered the wide-open Democratic primary for Maryland attorney general. Labor unions and the state teachers association supported him, but he never made the ballot: The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that the former federal prosecutor was ineligible because he lacked sufficient legal experience in the state.
“That was a really crushing experience for him,” recalled Rob Richie, a friend from Takoma Park. Richie, executive director of the voting reform group FairVote, said Perez could have gone into the private sector “to make a lot more money.”
But O’Malley appointed him Maryland’s secretary of labor, licensing and regulation. In that role, Perez pushed to protect employees from being incorrectly classified as independent contractors, a categorization that kept them from receiving unemployment insurance and workers compensation.
Fred D. Mason Jr., president of the Maryland and District of Columbia AFL-CIO, on Saturday called that Perez’s most important accomplishment in Annapolis.
“As a union leader, I certainly believe that labor rights and workers’ rights are also civil rights, and Tom has an appreciation for that,” said Mason, who represents about 350,000 workers.
Duncan, the former county executive, called Perez “a fierce advocate of labor.” He was also extremely loyal to O’Malley, Duncan said, recalling that Perez surprised some of his liberal allies by supporting the governor’s proposal to legalize slot-machine gambling in Maryland.
“He is someone who understands the plight of people in different positions,” said Isiah Leggett, the Montgomery county executive and former council member. “He also has the ability to bring practical and intellectual honesty to issues. You often don’t find that caliber of person who has served at the local level.”
When Leggett, the only African American ever elected to the county council, announced his campaign for county executive, Perez was among the first to endorse him.
O’Malley administration officials declined to comment on rumors that Perez might be Obama’s choice to head the Labor Department.
Perez received his undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1983, and four years later received law and public policy degrees from Harvard University. His wife, Ann Marie Staudenmaier, is an attorney with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.
J. Freedom du Lac, Philip Rucker and Michael Fletcher contributed to this report.
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Obama to Nominate Sharia Supporter, Illegal Immigrant Advocate as Labor Secretary
March 12, 2013
By Matthew Vadum
American Thinker
President Obama reportedly intends to nominate in-your-face radical leftist lawyer Thomas Perez as his next Secretary of Labor.
Now an assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, Perez is a former top aide to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and possibly a perjurer.
Perez led the Obama administration's assault on voter ID laws last year. As John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky report in Who's Counting, as a member of the Montgomery County, Md., Council in 2003 he also tried to force governments to accept fraud-prone matricula consular ID cards issued by Mexican consular offices. He was a board member of Casa de Maryland, an advocacy group for illegal aliens funded by George Soros and the recently deceased Hugo Chavez.
Perez is apparently in favor of Saudi-style anti-blasphemy laws. In Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries offenders can be condemned to death merely for insulting Islam.
Amazingly, at a congressional hearing last year, Perez pointedly declined to rule out bringing such laws to the United States. At the July 27, 2012, meeting of the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, Perez refused to 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?" Congressman 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.
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.
Perez, now nominally the nation's top civil rights enforcer at the Department of Justice, has an appalling track record at the DOJ and myriad unsavory associations.
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.
Under Perez, the DOJ has refused to prosecute hate crimes committed against white Americans. He was reportedly instrumental in the Justice Department's dismissal of a case involving two Philadelphia-based members of the New Black Panther Party who intimidated white voters on Election Day 2008.
Perez graduated from Harvard Law School, long a hotbed of radical leftist activity. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently irritated left-wingers when an old speech of his surfaced in which he pointed out that Harvard Law is filled with what he called "communists."
Cruz, of course, was correct. Harvard Law is bursting with adherents of "Critical Legal Studies" which is a crude legal theory derived from Marxism.
If confirmed, Perez would replace Hilda Solis, a former Democratic congresswoman from Los Angeles who resigned in January.
Solis treated the Labor Department as an arm of the labor movement and treated business as an enemy, not a partner in creating jobs. She also discarded Bush era transparency rules that fought union corruption.
As Capital Research Center (my employer) president Terrence Scanlon wrote, one of the most important things Solis did at the Department of Labor was
her reversal of Bush administration efforts to fight union corruption. Ms. Solis' predecessor, Elaine Chao, had issued several rule changes to make it easier for union members and watchdogs to detect wrongdoing, especially conflicts of interest among union officials and the people with whom they do business.
Will Perez be even worse than Solis?
We'll see.
Articles: Obama to Nominate Sharia Supporter, Illegal Immigrant Advocate as Labor Secretary
