Politics Before Justice at Obama’s DOJ

Posted By Conn Carroll On August 31, 2009

On Friday of last week, following the announcement that Attorney General Eric Holder would appoint a prosecutor to re-investigate  the CIA’s treatment of detainees, former Vice President Dick Cheney taped an interview with Fox News. During the interview, which aired yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Cheney describes Holder’s decision as an “outrageous political act” that will have “devastating”  consequences within the CIA.

Cheney is dead on. But unfortunately Holder’s political CIA witch hunt is just the latest example of a troubling pattern of politicization of the Justice Department under Holder.

Voter Intimidation: On Election Day 2008, members of the New Black Panther Party dressed in military-style uniforms were filmed standing outside a polling place in Philadelphia. According to a complaint filed by career lawyers at the Justice Department, the New Black Panther Party violated section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act by engaging “in coercion, threats, and intimidation” of voters, including “racial threats and racial insults” as well as brandishing “a deadly weapon.”

One of the defendants named was Jerry Jackson, a Democratic Committeeman of the 14th Ward in Philadelphia. The front-line career lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division recommended that Justice seek sanctions against the party and three of its members after the government had already won a default judgment in federal court against the men. But then Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, the politically appointed No. 3 official in the Obama Justice Department, intervened. Instead of following through and getting an injunction to prevent this behavior in future elections, the suit was dismissed against all defendants, but Jackson, who received a watered-down injunction to prevent him from carrying a weapon in a polling place. But only in Philadelphia and only until 2012!

Public Corruption: In 2008, a federal grand jury began an investigation into a possible pay-to-play scheme in which lucrative work on New Mexico bond deals went to a Gov. Bill Richardson (D) donor. But then just last week, news leaked that that no one would be charged in the investigation with sources telling the Associated Press: “It’s over. There’s nothing. It was killed in Washington.”  Heritage senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky explains why this is so troubling: “For anyone familiar with internal Justice Department procedures, this is particularly suspicious. The DOJ has a manual called “Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses” (I helped edit the latest edition when I was at Justice) that sets out the rules and procedures for U.S. attorneys when they are investigating these types of public-corruption cases. It is the U.S. attorney in New Mexico who would normally make the final call on a local public-corruption case, not ‘top Justice Department officials’ in Washington.”

Undermining National Security: In 2004 the CIA Inspector General issued a report documenting alleged detainee abuse by CIA interrogators and contractors. The DOJ’s career, not political, prosecutors then examined that document and other incidents from Iraq and Afghanistan for legal accountability. In one case, the DOJ decided to prosecute, and has already obtained a criminal conviction of a CIA contractor.  Furthermore, the CIA has also taken their own disciplinary action against others involved in the incidents.  As Heritage senior fellow Peter Brookes explains , Holder’s decision to re-investigate the CIA will have a chilling effect on the morale at the agency and will leave officers in the field wondering whether they should be more concerned about getting terrorists or getting lawyers.

Anyone familiar with Holder’s history should not be surprised by the politicization of the Justice Department under his leadership. In 1999, Holder promoted clemency for 16 members of FALN and Los Macheteros, terrorist organizations linked by the FBI to more than 130 bombings and six murders. Then in 2000 Holder played a prominent role in the pardon of Marc Rich, whose ex-wife gave considerable sums to the Democratic Party ($867,000) and the Clinton Library ($450,000).

Now, as the head of DOJ, Holder’s political decisions are undermining core rule of law concerns including the integrity of elections, ethical governance, and national security. Holder reports directly to his boss, President Barack Obama. Someone needs to be held accountable.

Love him or hate him , he sure hits the nail on the head with this!

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world doesn’t care about your
self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault , so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

 Outsourcing Your Tax Dollars

Posted By Conn Carroll On August 28, 2009

During a July 7th Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on the 1,500 page Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) got Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson to admit that “U.S. action alone will not impact CO2 levels.”  This is 100% consistent with all the best science which shows that the carbon reductions under Waxman-Markey will not affect global temperatures in any material way. For example a recent study  of cap-and-trade by MIT concluded:

The different U.S. policies have relatively small effects on the CO2 concentration if other regions do not follow the U.S. lead…The Developed Only scenario cuts only about 0.5 °C of the warming from the reference, again illustrating the importance of developing country participation.

As we have asked before, “So how is that ‘developing country participation’ going?”  Well, just this week ministers from 10 African countries renewed their intent to demand billions of dollars in aid before they sign any climate agreement and both China and India  have also made it crystal clear that they require billions in aid to help finance carbon-reducing projects before they agree to reduce their emissions.

So where are all these billions of dollars going to come from? You, of course. A recently leaked document from the G20 Climate Finance Experts Group  refers to “carbon market finance,” as a major source of the “hundreds of billions of dollars per year” delivered to the rest of the world by the U.S. and the other wealthier nations. So what is “carbon market finance?” It’s what Waxman-Markey proponents call cap and trade even though, in reality, all it is a huge new energy tax.

But the story gets even better. Remember all those EPA  and CBO  estimates purporting to show how little the Waxman-Markey energy tax would hurt consumers? Well, besides the fact that they all ignored the cost of lost GDP from higher energy taxes, the CBO and EPA also assumed that Waxman-Markey would rebate all of its tax proceeds back to consumers. For example, the CBO estimates Waxman-Markey would raise taxes on Americans by $872.8 billion between 2010-2019 but then also assumes that the federal government will immediately turn around and spend $863.8 billion.

In other words, the left in Congress has already spent 100.3% percent of the “carbon market finance” revenues raised . And not a single penny of it has yet been allocated to India, China, and the other developing countries that are demanding cash payments from us before they lift a finger to reduce carbon emissions.

As our economy struggles to recover, our leaders should be working to lower our energy costs and develop our own natural resources, not enacting complex regulatory schemes that will crush our economy and send our hard-earned money overseas.

How State and Local Governments Can Help Control Illegal Immigration

Posted By Conn Carroll On August 27, 2009

Meeting with his counterparts from Mexico and Canada earlier this month, President Barack Obama said that he expected the Democratic-controlled Congress, after completing work on health care, energy and financial regulation, to draft comprehensive immigration reform bills this year . This time frame acknowledges that no immigration legislation will be passed until at least 2010 . But as Heritage visiting fellow Matt Meyer points out in a new report  there is still plenty that states can do, in the meantime,  under their own constitutionally-protected traditional police powers to tackle the problem right now.

Illegal immigration is a relatively new public policy problem. In 1980, there were only 3.5 million illegal aliens in the United States, which represented 1.5% of the total U.S. population. That year, 1.5 million illegal aliens lived in California — 6.6% of its population—making the Golden State the only state in the union whose illegal aliens comprised more than 3% of its population. It was only after the 1986 immigration reform bill, which provided amnesty to more than three million illegal aliens, that an ever increasing surge of people began entering the U.S. illegally. There are now an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States representing almost 4% of our population and 18 states have joined California with illegal populations exceeding 3%.

In response to this influx of illegal aliens — which places increasingly greater burdens on state and local budgets, law enforcement, and public infrastructure like hospitals and schools – states began exercising their constitutional powers by engaging in a flurry of activity to curtail illegal immigration. The primary areas of action were: (1) driver’s licenses and identification, (2) public benefits, (3) access to higher education benefits, (4) voting, (5) criminal sanctions, and (6) employment. But states can, and should, do more. Mayer identifies a host of state and local government policy fixes including:

Mandate the use of the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to verify entitlement to all state and local government benefits;
Make it a felony to falsely claim legal presence in the United States;
Make it a felony and a predicate racketeering crime to smuggle aliens;
Outlaw sanctuary cities, including day-labor sites;
Institute a withholding tax for all electronic funds wire transfers to foreign parties or on negotiable bank drafts and international money orders without a valid Social Security Number;
Ban the use of foreign identification documents to establish identity or to obtain state identification cards unless accompanied by a U.S. document that demonstrates legal presence in the United States;
Restrict the use of taxpayer identification numbers for purposes not authorized by the Internal Revenue Service, including identification, unless accompanied by a U.S. document that demonstrates legal presence in the United States.
Turning to what the federal government should do, Mayer concludes:

Congress should help [localities], not by passing an amnesty reform package, but by amending the statutory (not constitutional) provisions that limit the actions they can take and by increasing the legal means for foreigners to come to the United States to work. The only way to end or significantly slow illegal immigration in America is to create a mosaic of laws across the country that increase the cost of illegal immigration to a point that the supply dwindles to a trickle as the demand is filled by legal workers.