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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Brewer faces political struggle to expand Medicaid

(PNI) From the political notebook:

A lot of attention has been paid to the substance of Gov. Jan Brewer's Medicaid-expansion proposal. Less attention has been paid to a political and legal question that may be more important in determining its fate: How many Republican votes does it need in the Legislature to be enacted?

The assumption is that all the Democrats in the Legislature will vote for it. They may be tempted to attempt to bargain for something else in exchange for their support. If they are serious about the priority they claim to put on the expansion, they will forgo that temptation.

Republican votes for expansion will be tricky to come by. If Brewer has to sell not only the expansion but what Democrats want in exchange for their votes in favor, it might become a bridge too far.

So, assume Democrats play it straight and Brewer can pocket their votes. If the expansion only needs a simple majority to be enacted, that would require just three Republican votes in the Senate and seven in the House. Not much of a hill.

But Brewer's Medicaid-expansion proposal arguably needs more than a simple majority. Brewer is asking the Legislature to give the state agency that administers Medicaid authority to levy a provider assessment to pay the state's cost of providing Medicaid coverage for childless adults.

In 1992, voters approved an initiative that requires a two-thirds approval from both houses of the Legislature for any "net increase in state revenues." It explicitly includes "the imposition of any new state fee or assessment or the authorization of any new administratively set fee."

That would certainly seem to cover what the governor is proposing. The Governor's Office, however, is arguing that the assessment falls within an exception to the rule for "fees and assessments that are authorized by statute but are not prescribed by formula, amount or limit, and are set by a state officer or agency."

That's a stretch. While there might not be an amount set in the authorization to the penny, there's a clear understanding about its size. The number is in the governor's budget and proposal. Claiming that exception would be a dubious wink and a nod at a voter-approved constitutional requirement.

If the two-thirds approval applies, that raises the number of Republican votes Brewer needs to seven in the Senate and 16 in the House. The hill just became steeper.

There is an informal rule in both the Senate and the House that leadership will not bring any bill to the floor that doesn't have the support of a majority of the majority. That would require nine Republican votes in favor in the Senate and 18 in the House. Even steeper.

Put another way, if "the majority of the majority" requirement prevails, just nine of 30 senators or 19 of 60 House members could block the expansion.

The governor might be able to bargain for an agreement from leadership to bring Medicaid expansion to a vote without "the majority of the majority" requirement as part of a broader deal. But it would require pretty bruising negotiations. Permitting a vote on a Medicaid expansion opposed by a majority of his caucus would be particularly difficult for Senate President Andy Biggs.

My bet is that sequestration at the federal level occurs. Those are the budget cuts Congress adopted on a standby basis if the so-called supercommittee didn't come up with an alternative way to cut the deficit. They were designed to be so unpalatable that the supercommittee couldn't fail. It did anyway, and Congress and President Barack Obama are no closer today than then to agreeing on an alternative.

Republicans don't like the sequestration cuts because they fall disproportionately on defense. The House has passed an alternative that puts more of the burden on domestic spending.

Democrats aren't willing to come up with alternative cuts. They insist on more revenue and fewer cuts overall. It's becoming increasingly obvious to Republicans that the choice isn't between sequestration cuts and some alternative set of spending reductions. The real choice is between sequestration cuts and no cuts.

Despite deep misgivings about the effect on defense, I think Republicans will opt for the sequestration cuts rather than no cuts. At this point, deficit hawks in the Republican Party are stronger than the defense hawks.

Reach Robb at robert.robb @arizonarepublic.com.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Lester Pearce faces judicial investigation

Former Mesa Justice of the Peace Lester Pearce was formally charged Thursday with violating judicial standards in connection with alleged campaign activities during last year's historic recall election involving his brother.

The state Commission on Judicial Conduct filed the charges and said they will be weighed in a formal hearing for which the date will be announced later.

"The charges relate to several instances where it is alleged former Judge Pearce engaged in political activity on behalf of other candidates," a news release from the commission said.

"Judges are prohibited from making speeches on behalf of another candidate for political office, publicly endorsing another candidate for any public office, and actively taking part in any political campaign other than his own campaign for election, re-election or retention in office."

Pearce is alleged to have campaigned last year on behalf of Mesa resident Olivia Cortes, who is widely believed to have been a sham candidate in the recall election in which Russell Pearce, then the Arizona Senate president, was fighting to stay in office.

Petition-gatherers for Cortes told The Arizona Republic during the campaign that the idea was to siphon votes from Pearce's foremost challenger, Jerry Lewis.

Cortes withdrew from the campaign in October, one day before she was to have been called back into county court to testify in a lawsuit that challenged her candidacy.

Lewis went on to defeat Pearce by 12 percentage points, making the longtime Mesa politician, one of the nation's leading opponents of illegal immigration, the first sitting Senate president on any level to be recalled in this country.

Russell Pearce's effort to return to the Senate hit a brick wall in August when he lost to Mesa businessman Bob Worsley by a similar margin in the Republican primary in District 25.

Lester Pearce, meanwhile, had resigned as justice of the peace after 15 years to run for a seat on the county Board of Supervisors. He, too, lost in the August primary.

The Commission on Judicial Conduct said in its news release that "the maximum sanction involving a former judge is a censure and payment of costs and fees associated with the proceeding."

It alleges that Lester Pearce:

Knowingly accompanied a niece in a car while she gathered petition signatures for Cortes and "may have engaged in direct contact with some individuals for the purpose of advocating against the recall of his brother during his niece's activities on behalf of candidate Cortes."

Spoke on behalf of his brother at a Sept. 15, 2011, Republican Party meeting in Mesa, the minutes of which were later edited to remove those remarks.

The complaint lists four counts against Lester Pearce as a result of those alleged incidents: improper political campaign activities, improper public political statements, abuse of the prestige of judicial office and failure to cooperate with and be honest and candid with the Commission on Judicial Conduct.

Through lawyer A. Melvin McDonald, Pearce filed a response in which he claims to have played no role in his niece's political activities; did not engage people in an effort to influence the campaign; and did not speak on behalf of his brother at the party meeting.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Romney faces question about possible VP picks

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mitt Romney may still be fighting to win the Republican presidential nomination, but he's also been fielding questions about who he'd choose as his running mate.

The question came up again Friday during a town-hall meeting in Jackson, Miss. While Romney offered no names, he says the Republican Party has many excellent governors, senators and former elected officials.

He said his most important criteria in a running mate would be a person who has shown they can be president.

Romney leads his Republican rivals in the race for convention delegates as the party's nominating contest turns to the Deep South. The former Massachusetts governor was headed to Alabama after his Mississippi stop. Both states hold GOP primaries on Tuesday.

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Black Dem faces tough race for Miss. governor (AP)

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS, Associated Press Emily Wagster Pettus, Associated Press – Wed Aug 24, 8:05 pm ET

JACKSON, Miss. – After making history this week as the first black candidate to win a major-party nomination for Mississippi governor, Democrat Johnny DuPree now faces the tough reality of trying to win a general election against a better-known, better-funded GOP candidate in a strongly Republican state.

DuPree, the mayor of Mississippi's third-largest city, Hattiesburg, said he's not daunted because he has usually been outspent in campaigns. He said he plans to continue running a race-neutral campaign focused on jobs and education.

"We're in the race to try to make a difference for the citizens of Mississippi," the 57-year-old DuPree said after winning the Democratic primary runoff Tuesday night. "Our first priority is not the (campaign) finances."

An expert on black political participation said Wednesday that DuPree has little chance of defeating the Republican nominee, Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, in the Nov. 8 general election.

"My guess is if the odds-makers were putting odds on this, it would probably be something like 100-to1," said David Bositis, senior political analyst for the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "Mississippi isn't ready to elect a black candidate to major statewide office."

Bositis, who has spent more than two decades researching voting trends, said Mississippi is one of several Deep South states that has developed re-segregated electoral patterns, "with the Republican Party being the white people's party and pretty much just African-Americans being the Democratic Party."

Mississippi's current governor, Republican Haley Barbour, is limited to two terms and couldn't seek re-election this year.

Republicans have held the Mississippi Governor's Mansion four of the past five terms, and the state has voted Republican in every presidential race since 1980.

With a population that's 37 percent black, Mississippi now has more black elected officials than any state in the nation, according to the joint center.

However, Mississippi hasn't had a black statewide official since Reconstruction. Decades ago, black citizens faced threats, violence and poll taxes for trying to exercise their right to vote. The political structure started to change and black voter participation began to increase after the federal civil rights and voting rights acts became law in the mid-1960s.

Marvin King, a political science professor at the University of Mississippi, said DuPree's win this week is significant.

"Even in Mississippi, you can have a statewide candidate who is black, who won a nomination, who earned his way to the top of a ticket," King said Wednesday.

Bryant, the one-term lieutenant governor, said that when he called DuPree to congratulate him Tuesday night, he noted the significance of a black candidate winning a major-party nomination for governor.

"I told him, there are children all across this state that look to him as an example now," Bryant, 56, of Brandon, said Wednesday. "I think it's a very historic moment. Now, we disagree on some issues and we'll have a debate about that."

Aaron Barksdale, a Mississippi voter who describes himself as a Libertarian, posted Wednesday night on DuPree's campaign page on Facebook: "Just remember: A vote BECAUSE he is Black is just as RACIST as voting AGAINST him because he's Black."

DuPree campaign manager Sam Hall posted a response that said "voting for or against someone because of their skin color is a ridiculous way to pick a candidate. That's why the only time we talk about race in this campaign is when the media asks about it or someone brings it up like this."

DuPree leads a city that is roughly half black, half white. He does not dwell on race as an issue in the governor's election, although he has acknowledged in interviews that it's a concern for some voters. He said the color he likes to discuss is green, as in money generated from job creation.

DuPree defeated Bill Luckett, a white Clarksdale attorney and developer, in the runoff.

Luckett immediately endorsed DuPree, saying the mayor has shown a desire to help all people in the state.

Independent Will Oatis of Silver Creek is also running for governor. Rival factions of the Reform Party want to put a candidate in the race.

Barksdale, 31, of Ocean Springs, told The Associated Press in a phone interview that he posted the Facebook comment because he got tired of people treating him as if he's racist because he didn't vote for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, when Obama was elected the first black U.S. president.

"I have nothing against Johnny DuPree. He did a lot of good for Hattiesburg," Barksdale said. "But in 2008, it was the largest black voter turnout in history and it was all because Obama was there."

Barksdale said he voted for one of the Republicans who lost to Bryant in the Aug. 2 primary, and he doesn't yet know which candidate he'll support in November.

Two other high-profile black politicians ran for Mississippi governor as independents in the 1970s. Charles Evers, brother of slain civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, ran in 1971. State Sen. Henry Kirksey ran in 1975. Neither had to go through a primary.

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