Just How Bad Is Tom Perez?

Everyone seems to think the Democratic Party dodged a bullet in selecting former Labor Secretary Thomas Perez over radical Islamist Rep. Keith Ellison for party chairman. A look at Perez's record shows that the party dodged nothing. Ellison's appeal to Democrats was in his openly deranged radical extremism, he was billed as the outsider, the upstart, the new wave to freshen up the stale party that had lost so badly last November. Perez was somehow declared the moderate by default. Fact is, he was just as extreme in his views, but less noisy than Ellison. Instead of Ellison's cacaphony and creepy associates, Perez had a actual track record. It could be summed up as one damaging-to-democracy act after another, all in the name of advancing he Democratic Party's partisan interests. What it means is that he places party over state, same as Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez did.

Interestingly enough, CASA de Maryland, a Soros-funded group dedicated to helping illegal immigrants flout U.S. immigration law that Perez headed up, took a $1.5 million donation in 2008 from the Venezuelan dictator. Perez seems to have taken Chavez's philosophy along with it, which isn't that surprising: His dad was a well-known henchman for Rafael Trujillo, the bemedaled, mirrored-sunglassed Idi-Amin-style thug dictator of the Dominican Republic who used to throw his opponents literally into the shark pools over his 30-plus years rule. Trujillo was the grotesque dictator featured in Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's Feast of the Goat. One cannot control who one's relatives are, of course, but Perez is notable for lying about it, not just in denying the relationship but in saying it was the opposite of what it was. That baggage may have been why Perez did not secure the vice presidential slot for Hillary Clinton, but it was no obstacle to serving in the Obama administration. Starting out as President Obama's Assistant Attorney General in 2009 under far-left Attorney General Eric Holder, Perez headed up the controversy-filled civil rights division and showed what he was truly about. Right out the gate, the Black Panther voter suppression controversy came up. New Black Panther Party goons were filmed lurking at voting stations with truncheons in a bid to intimidate voters in Philadelphia during the 2008 election. Instead of prosecute the obvious violation of voter rights, Perez opted to drop charges. After all, it was his party that benefited. After that, the issue of undelivered and uncounted military ballots, affecting overseas servicemen came up. Perez's department did nothing to rectify the situation and declined to prosecute states or failing to deliver ballots. Only when they had been made aware that demographics were changing as to who the military voters were voting for, meaning Democrats, was any action at all taken. Then there was the effort to halt voter fraud in Florida, where Perez's DoJ filed a lawsuit to stop Florida from purging its voter rolls of 182,000 non-citizens. In June 2012, it was thrown out by a Clinton-appointed federal judge. Perez filed race-baiting lawsuits against municipalities to force them to scrap written tests for police and firefighters to ensure affirmative action hiring. American Spectator's Quin Hillyer wrot Perez argued that black firefighter applicants who flunked 70% of their entrance exams should get a free pass to the New York firefighters academy. Ellison has nothing on Perez as an agent of racial division. A DOJ report Perez also has led the Obama administration's charge against voter ID laws, attempting to halt a South Carolina case that according to Hillier, got " smacked down hard" by the U.S. District Court for the D.C. Circuit. He also initiated additional junk lawsuits against peaceful anti-abortion protestors in Florida and against colorful Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. As for his own division of DOJ, a 250-page internal DOJ Inspector General's report blasted it for its hothouse atmosphere of racial grievance mongering, "with several incidents in which deep ideological polarization fueled disputes and mistrust that harmed the functioning of the Voting Section." Some leadership. This is the work of a rabid activist who sees advancing the leftist agenda and the party that has adopted it as the goal. The party's supremacy is his goal and the law is an obstacle. Sounds a heckuva lot like the Obama administration, which he exerted considerable influence over. Will the voters go for same-old, same-old? The current state of the Democratic Party seems to think there's a need for more of it.