Obama’s Labor Nominee Faces G.O.P. Critics in Senate

WASHINGTON — Responding to sharp criticism from Republicans for his work on housing discrimination and voting rights at the Justice Department, Thomas E. Perez, President Obama’s choice to head the Labor Department, on Thursday defended his record and said that if confirmed, his focus would be on tackling the nation’s high unemployment rate.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the labor committee, cited a scathing report from other Republican lawmakers as he questioned Mr. Perez about a deal he helped broker with officials in St. Paul for the city to drop a housing discrimination lawsuit in exchange for the Justice Department’s declining to join two whistle-blower complaints against the city.

“That seems to me to be an extraordinary amount of wheeling and dealing outside the normal responsibilities of the assistant attorney general for civil rights,” Mr. Alexander said.

He later added that he expected Mr. Perez to respond in full to a subpoena from Representative Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, for personal e-mails believed to contain more information about the deal.

Mr. Perez countered that not only had he sought the guidance of ethics experts on the agreement, his had not been the final word.

“The senior career people in the civil division kicked the tires on this case. They looked at it very carefully, they made a very considered judgment that it was a weak case,” he said.

Democrats were eager to voice their support for Mr. Perez, who, if confirmed would be the only Hispanic member of the cabinet.

Anticipating questions about the deal, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, the committee chairman, opened the questioning by leading Mr. Perez through a series of largely yes-or-no queries designed to rebut the Republican report.

“As I said, we have gone through this with a fine-tooth comb, with our lawyers, with our staff,” Mr. Harkin said. “And everything I can see is that you acted appropriately and ethically to advance the interests of the United States.”

Questioning the role of politics in Mr. Perez’s challenges to voting laws, Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, brought up the Justice Department’s move to block that state’s voter identification law in 2011 on the grounds that it would discourage minority voters.

“As I look at your management style, it seems to have a political perspective, a political bias in the management style,” Mr. Scott said. “It seems not to be open and not to be balanced and certainly not to be fair.”

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, released a statement in March vowing to block Mr. Perez’s nomination pending a response from the Justice Department on his accusations of uneven enforcement of voter registration rights in his state.

As expected, many of the questions focused on job creation, with senators from both parties asking about his commitment to the Job Corps, a training program for young people, among others.

“Jobs, jobs, and jobs,” Mr. Perez said, summing up his top priority as labor secretary. “I believe it’s critically important to get Americans back to work, and I believe the Department of Labor can play a critical role.”

The committee plans to take up the nomination again next week.

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Obama's critics lose sight of big picture with Syria

The war faction in the Republican Party is stirring again, this time over Syria.

There is a rising chorus of Republican voices criticizing President Barack Obama's handling of the Syrian civil war and basically saying that the United States should do whatever is necessary to ensure that the rebels oust Bashar Assad.

Certainly, Syria is a heartbreaking wreck. Since the conflict began, 17,000 have been killed. More than 300,000 have become external or internal refugees.

The U.S. has a strategic interest in seeing Assad gone, goes the argument, because he is an ally of Iran. And if the United States were to take a leadership role, he could be ousted with less bloodshed.

The same claim was made regarding Libya, that Moammar Gadhafi could be ousted with less bloodshed if the U.S. took the military lead.

It's not clear where this notion that the United States does war neat and tidy comes from. The last dictator the United States took the lead in ousting, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, resulted in more than 115,000 civilian war-related deaths and 2.7million displaced persons.

Chasing the Taliban from Afghanistan was neat and tidy. Basically, all the U.S. did was tip the balance of power from one ragtag militia, the Taliban, to another, the Northern Alliance.

But what happened after that was far from neat and tidy. A decade and half-a-trillion dollars later, we still have nearly 90,000 troops there. Civilian war-related deaths just since 2007 are estimated at around 12,000. More than 300,000 Afghans are believed to be internal refugees.

The Republican war faction claims not to be calling for boots on the ground in Syria. But if the U.S. took the military lead and things got messy and disorderly, which is more likely than not, they would. They always do. And they always oppose withdrawing ground troops once deployed.

The present call is for the United States to arm the rebels and provide air cover. But it is far from clear that such a direct U.S. involvement is necessary to oust Assad.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar are committed to seeing him gone and are providing material assistance to the rebels. Combined, they have a GDP 25 times that of Syria's, and military expenditures 30 times as great. If Assad is to be ousted, U.S. taxpayers don't have to pay the bill.

The Republican pugilists, however, believe it is better for the U.S. to take the lead even if it isn't necessary. They are still grumbling about Libya even though, objectively, it seems preliminarily quite a success story. The dictator is gone. The country has elected the least Islamist government in the Arab Spring. No one in Libya is looking to the United States to provide security, electricity, roads, hospitals or schools. Other countries took the lead. The U.S. supporting role cost just $2billion and no U.S. casualties.

The problem with many Republican hawks is they actually prefer for other countries to depend on the United States and fail to discriminate between where U.S. involvement is necessary and where others can shoulder the burden.

Only the United States can lead the effort to put sufficient international pressure on Iran to abandon the development of nuclear weapons. But between the Sunni Arabs, Turkey and Israel, there's more than enough local opposition to manage its regional troublemaking without the United States.

There's a lot not to like in Obama's foreign policy. But one of the things he has done right is nudge other countries to take more of a role and responsibility in these kinds of regional conflicts.

Mitt Romney is running as a Republican tough-guy wannabe. His foreign-policy pronouncements are at least as bellicose as George W. Bush's. It's worth noting that Bush's approach to the rest of the world was soundly repudiated by voters in 2006 and 2008.

In any conflict, the Republican war faction can conjure up some U.S. interests at stake. We're a global power. Everything that happens everywhere affects us.

But the Republican war faction misses the bigger picture. Not everything that happens everywhere requires us. And it is decidedly not in the United States' interest to own all the world's messes.

Reach Robb at robert.robb

@arizonarepublic.com.

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