Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and former Maryland Secretary of Labor, to be Labor secretary. A highly qualified nominee, but for a department the Republicans would just as soon drown in a bathtub, and with a sympathy for workers they detest.
The "Owl" has implicitly hooted the threat:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Wednesday excoriated President Obama's nominee for Labor Secretary, Tom Perez, as a "crusading ideologue" who's willing to break the law to achieve "far-left" goals.
"He is a committed ideologue who appears willing, quite frankly, to say or do anything to achieve his ideological ends," McConnell said on the floor. "His willingness, time and again, to bend or ignore the law and to misstate the facts in order to advance his far-left ideology lead me and others to conclude that he'd continue to do so if he were confirmed to another, and much more consequential, position of public trust."
Foreshadowing a filibuster of Perez, the minority leader, who is up for reelection next year, pounded earlier remarks by the nominee saying it's sometimes necessary to "push the envolope" when federal law is "muddled."
"Taken together," McConnell said, "all of this paints the picture, for me at least, not of a passionate liberal who sees himself as patiently operating within the system and through the democratic process to advance a particular set of strongly held beliefs, but a crusading ideologue whose conviction about his own rightness on the issues leads him to believe the law does not apply to him. Unbound by the rules that apply to everyone else, Mr. Perez seems to view himself as free to employ whatever means at his disposal, legal or otherwise, to achieve his ideological goals."
"To say this is problematic would be an understatement."
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/...
Over to you, Harry.