-Caveat Lector-
JOHN FUND'S POLITICAL DIARY
The Borking Begins
Linda Chavez�s mistake was she took a less fortunate person into
her home.
Monday, January 8, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
Bork became a verb in 1987, when liberal interest groups defeated
Judge Robert Bork's nomination for the Supreme Court. Sen. Ted
Kennedy pulled out all the stops by saying that in "Robert Bork's
America . . . blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters;
rogue police would break down citizens' doors in midnight raids."
Sen. Howell Heflin of Alabama vaguely told constituents that
Judge Bork had a "strange lifestyle."
Ever since then, to bork has come to mean "to pull out all the
stops in opposition to a presidential nominee." In 1991, black
feminist Florence Kennedy told a National Organization for Women
conference that Clarence Thomas had to be defeated: "We're going
to bork him. We're going to kill him politically. . . . This
little creep, where did he come from?" Unlike some others, Judge
Thomas survived his Senate confirmation for a Supreme Court seat,
albeit by a vote of only 52-48.
It's been a few years since a full-fledged borking, but this
month we may see three. Yesterday the New York Times even ran a
chart of "likely borkees and their probable score on the
bork-o-meter." It read like an account of an ACLU/Sierra Club
sporting event. John Ashcroft rated nine borks in his battle to
become attorney general, Gale Norton got six borks as interior
secretary-designate, and Linda Chavez merited five borks in her
effort to become Labor Secretary.
The first round in Linda Chavez's borking also began yesterday
with a script borrowed from the travails of Zo� Baird, President
Clinton's first ill-fated choice to be his attorney general in
1993. Many senators in both parties felt she had disqualified
herself by hiring an illegal alien to take care of her child and
failing to pay the employer's share of Social Security taxes. The
Wall Street Journal disagreed, saying that her child-care problem
was a useful pretext for her opponents. Those included trial
lawyers who disliked her support of tort reform and left-wingers
who were suspicious of her background as counsel for the Aetna
insurance company. In the end, Ms. Baird's nomination was
withdrawn, and Janet Reno eventually became attorney general.
Now Linda Chavez has been accused of providing housing a decade
ago to Marta Mercado, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, when
she lived in Bethesda, Md. Abigail Thernstrom, a former member of
the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and a friend of Ms. Chavez, says
that Ms. Mercado had been "badly abused" by a boyfriend and was
taken in by Ms. Chavez in late 1991 for several months. Ms.
Chavez helped Ms. Mercado learn the transit system so she could
commute to her regular employment. "She had a job already, and
did not work for Linda," Ms. Thernstrom told me. Tucker Eskew, a
Bush transition team spokesman, said Ms. Mercado "did chores
around the house" on an irregular basis. Once in a while, Ms.
Chavez would give her some money for food or other essentials if
she was running low.
Yesterday the Washington Post interviewed Ms. Mercado, who is now
a U.S. citizen living in the Washington area. She confirmed Ms.
Chavez's account that she stayed at her house and did some chores
as a sign of appreciation. "In reality, I was not an employee,"
she told the Post. Federal law requires employers to check the
legal immigration status of workers they hire. However, clear
exemptions are built into the law for housekeepers who provide
"sporadic, irregular, and intermittent service."
"This is not a nanny problem," claims Mr. Eskew, who noted that
Ms. Chavez also employed housekeepers at the time, for which she
paid taxes. In 1991, her three children ranged in age from 13 to
22.
We don't know all the facts yet, and ABC News reports the FBI may
have found discrepancies between Ms. Chavez's account of the
episode and what others say. But not having all the facts hasn't
prevented Ms. Chavez's opponents from speaking out. Sen. Kennedy,
temporary chairman of the Senate Labor Committee until
Inauguration Day, called it "a very troubling new allegation."
Jesse Jackson, showing his trademark subtlety, called Ms.
Mercado's situation "indentured servitude."
Ms. Chavez is known as a genuine "compassionate conservative,"
who doesn't wait for government to help individuals she meets who
are in need. She has acted on that impulse since her college days
tutoring disadvantaged children in the Denver barrio and later
during her time as an aide to the head of the American Federation
of Teachers, a national teachers union. In the late 1970s, when
she lived in Shepherd Park, a predominately black section of
Washington, she supported two Vietnamese brothers as guests in
her home for several weeks. Since the early 1990s, she has taken
in first one, and then two, children of a Puerto Rican woman as
part of a program to give underprivileged kids a summer break
from the inner city. In 1997 she began paying their tuition to
Catholic school so they would get a better education.
If Ms. Chavez's account checks out, her involvement with the
Guatemalan woman looks far more like a personal act of charity
than an exploitative employment situation like the one Mr.
Jackson describes. "It's more along the lines of having an
exchange student baby-sit for spending money rather than hiring a
full-time employee and paying them under the table," says one
employment lawyer.
That said, Ms. Chavez has certainly opened herself up for some
searching questions at her confirmation hearing. But before
Democratic senators pounce on Ms. Chavez, they would do well to
go back and read their floor statements and speeches on war-torn
Guatemala from a decade ago and ask themselves if they would have
preferred Ms. Chavez's guest be returned there at the time.
The Central American nation of nine million people had
experienced a 30-year-long civil war and was a cause c�l�bre for
liberals in 1991, the year Ms. Chavez took in her houseguest. Bob
Carty, a Canadian journalist, conducted a fact-finding mission
that March for the International Federation of Journalists and
reported that "in Guatemala, more people have disappeared than
during the generals' rule in Argentina, and more than 100,000
have died in political violence. More nuns and priests have been
raped or murderedthan in any other country."
Not every story of right-wing "death squads" in Guatemala can be
taken at face value. You may recall that the history of
persecution that Rigobertu Menchu, the Nobel Prize-winning
Guatemalan activist, turned out to be either exaggerated or
fabricated. But even so, Jorge Serrano, Guatemala's president in
1991, admitted to the Los Angeles Times that his country had "a
culture of death. . . . Everybody believes they can work outside
the law." The Guatemalan government's own statistics noted that
in the first eight months of 1991, 548 people were killed in
political violence and 114 others kidnapped. In the U.S. that
would be the equivalent of 15,000 people being murdered and 3,000
kidnapped. "Day after day, year after year, Guatemala is awash in
murder, torture, kidnapping and fear," the Los Angeles Times
concluded in 1991.
In the following years, conditions improved to the point that
it's understandable Ms. Chavez's houseguest would have wanted to
return to her native land. The civil war has ended and last month
Guatemala's Congress voted to allow U.S. dollars to become
interchangeable with the local currency. Even so, last year the
Clinton administration proposed a bill that would have allowed
450,000 refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti
who arrived before 1997 to be eligible for green cards and legal
residency in the U.S. "This is about fairness and redress and
closing the chapter on Central American wars," Maria Echaveste,
the deputy White House chief of staff, told reporters last Oct.
31. Among the bill's staunchest supporters were Sen. Kennedy,
along with other liberals who may soon be hurling stones at Ms.
Chavez.
In the end, congressional opposition--largely but not entirely
from conservatives--eventually forced the White House to agree to
a compromise that benefited immigrants from India and Mexico far
more than it did Central Americans. But the bill's sponsors in
both parties vow to try again, noting that President-elect Bush
has declared that "family values don't stop at the Rio Grande."
Linda Chavez apparently didn't think so either. Her personal
history is filled with examples of her showing personal
compassion for people in difficulty. As head of a think tank for
the past several years she has promoted equal opportunity while
opposing quotas, opposed destructive bilingual education
programs, and called for Congress to loosen restrictions on
skilled immigrants. There is no hypocrisy there.
Ms. Chavez's critics are another matter. "Throughout the 1900s,
liberals praised the sanctuary movement run by U.S. churches
which would take in central American refugees and protect them,"
says Ms. Thernstorm. "It's strange they would now criticize Linda
for taking in a battered woman."
There is no evidence that Ms. Chavez broke the law in providing
housing for a refugee from war-torn Guatemala. She has been
consistent in both her personal actions and her public positions
on issues. Somehow I doubt that all of her liberal critics on the
Senate floor would be able to demonstrate that same consistency
if called on to do so. Would they have suggested back in 1991
that Ms. Chavez's house guest should have been deported to
Guatemala? That wasn't their position then, and in the borking of
Ms. Chavez that's about to begin they shouldn't be allowed to
forget that.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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