We've had some unusual Cabinet secretaries in past
administrations -- Earl Butz, John Mitchell and James Watt come to mind -- but
never anything quite like the present bunch.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5
trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich -- the top 1
percent already contributes more in income taxes than does the bottom 90
percent -- to pay more for what he calls "the privilege of being an
American." Geithner, whose department oversees the IRS, should have taken
his own advice: As a rich American one-percenter, he once failed to pay his own
self-employment taxes, and improperly claimed his children's camp costs as a
dependent-care deduction.
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has pulled off the
near impossible: At a time when the known gas and oil reserves of the United
States on public lands have soared, he has cut back on federal leasing of them
to just about 2 percent of available offshore lands and 6 percent of onshore.
Meanwhile, huge new amounts of oil are now found on private lands despite, not
because of, the Interior Department. When he was a U.S. senator, Salazar
claimed that even $10-a-gallon gas would not change his mind about voting to
increase offshore drilling. And although he controls the leases of the richest
oil and gas reserves in the Western world, he just recently shrugged that no
one knew whether gas would hit $9 a gallon.
Then there is the even stranger case of Energy Secretary
Steven Chu, whose department helped oversee millions in bad loans to green
companies like Solyndra, First Solar and Solar Trust of America -- the Teapot
Dome scandals of our times. Chu once infamously quipped before assuming office
that he wanted U.S. gas prices to reach European levels. Apparently Chu wanted
to force less fossil-fuel burning -- although he later confessed that he does
not drive a car.
Chu also once warned that the California's Central Valley
agriculture might disappear due to global warming. True, it could decline, but
more likely due to the Obama administration's decision to divert irrigation
water in hopes of helping out the 3-inch San Francisco Delta smelt. Chu should
realize that private-sector California farmers create thousands of jobs, while
his own Cabinet's Solyndra-like projects have done precisely the opposite.
Attorney General Eric Holder dropped charges against the
New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation. That may explain why he said
nothing when the same group put out a dead-or-alive bounty poster on George
Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin shooting case. Holder's department is suing the
state of Arizona for passing a law to enforce the largely unenforced federal
immigration law. Holder suggested that the Arizona law was racially inspired
even as he admitted that he had never read it. Holder has praised the
race-baiting Al Sharpton for his "partnership" and called the country
"cowards" for not holding a national conversation on race on his
terms. The attorney general has referred to African-Americans as "my
people," and he has characterized congressional oversight of his office's
failure to rein in the Fast and Furious scandal as racially motivated attacks
on himself.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis just tried -- and failed --
to draft a proposal prohibiting kids under 18 from working "in the
storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials," even
on family farms. And she wanted to turn over some farm training programs now
run by the Future Farmers of America and the 4-H to the government. Most
Americans raised on a farm believe that the times spent doing chores with their
parents, siblings, and neighbors were the most important and rewarding years of
their lives.
Yet more worrisome, Solis is selective in her
enforcement. She envisions new rules for businesses, but she first should have
ensured that her family had followed old ones. When Solis was nominated, it was
learned that her husband had several tax liens against his business, some of
them 16 years old. And not long ago, Solis' department posted a video advising
illegal aliens to call her office if they felt they were treated unfairly by
employers. Abusing workers is wrong, but then so is entering and residing in
the United States illegally -- as a Cabinet official should know.
The common theme with these Cabinet secretaries is loud,
uninformed rhetoric; a lack of practical experience; a certain utopian zealotry
-- and an expectation that there are rules for government grandees and quite
different ones for the rest of us.
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