Last week I sent to you a special email about President Obama’s disturbing nomination of Thomas Perez to head the Department of Labor. (The committee vote on that nomination will be this week, by the way.) I’d like to lead off this week’s email by flagging another bad nominee.
“The fox is guarding the henhouse,” says Senator Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), a member of the Senate Banking Committee. He’s talking about President Obama’s nomination last week of Representative Mel Watt (D., N.C.) to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Washington Post reports that liberals are not altogether happy with the nomination either, pointing to Watts’s “coziness with the financial industry.”
And there’s a potentially bigger problem: Watt’s record in Congress has been one of consistently viewing public policy through a racial lens. So I would add that, if racial politics are not supposed to influence Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s policies — many believe such politics played a key role in the recent mortgage meltdown and ensuing financial crisis — it’s hard to imagine that Mel Watt is the man for this job. Along these lines, a National Review editorial this week called Watt, “Wall Street’s Favorite Racist,” and Charles Johnson’s piece in The Daily Caller argues, “Housing nominee Mel Watt helped create the subprime crisis.”
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Here’s an instructive exercise: The next time you read an article about “diversity” (see, e.g., the recent interview with the University of Wisconsin’s diversity honcho in Inside Higher Ed), mentally substitute the letters “BS” for “diversity” every time the latter appears. It’s amazing how much more accurate and understandable the article becomes!
Here, I’ll get you started:
‘Strategic BS Leadership’
April 26, 2013
College and university leaders talk all the time about their commitment to BS. And, on many campuses, students and faculty question the depth of that commitment. A new book, Strategic BS Leadership(Stylus) considers the steps colleges can take to transform their campuses. The author is Damon A. Williams, vice provost and chief BS officer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Williams responded via e-mail to questions about the book.
Q: People in higher education use the term “BS” all the time, yet you devote a chapter to defining it. Why is it important to define it, and how do you define it?
A: While “BS” has become one of the great buzzwords in the academy, it is rarely defined accurately, and rarely in ways that address its complexity. Etc.
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One of the topics I frequently discuss is felon voting — that is whether felons should be allowed to vote. The Center for Equal Opportunity’s position is that, if you aren’t willing to follow the law yourself, then you can’t demand a role in making the law for everyone else, which is what you do when you vote. The right to vote can be restored to felons, but it should be done carefully, on a case-by-case basis after a person has shown that he or she has really turned over a new leaf, not automatically on the day someone walks out of prison. After all, the unfortunate truth is that most people who walk out of prison will be walking back in. You can read more about this issue on our website here, and you can read my congressional testimony on this issue here.
Now, those on the other side always argue that, as soon as you’ve served your prison sentence, you should be able to vote because you’ve “paid your debt to society.” But who came up with that phrase? Because, when you think about it, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I mean, it’s not like, when you rob a liquor store, you’re just borrowing something from society the way you borrow money from a bank, and if you go to prison then you’ve paid it back, and we’re all square and nobody can hold it against you. It’s not like society says, “Hey, how about if we make a deal with you, and you can rob a liquor store, but if we catch you, then you have to agree to go to prison. We feel like that’s a good deal for us, getting to lock you up and pay for your room and board, and we’re willing to let you rob a liquor store if you let us do that. Banks like to receive loan payments, and we like to lock people up — it’s worth it to banks to loan money if they get repaid, and it’s worth it to us to let people rob liquor stores so long as we can lock people up.” As I said, this is silly, and so this paid-your-debt-to-society argument really doesn’t make much sense.
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I was recently interviewed on American RadioWorks about a case that the Center for Equal Opportunity has been very active in: Fisher v. University of Texas, which challenges racial preferences in college admissions. You can listen to that interview; it’s the first item (“Affirmative Action: Against”), here.
Related posts:
Two Other Points on Felon Voting
Politicized external review panels as unguided “diversity” missiles: California university administrators remain ultra-slow learnersTESTIMONY OF ROGER CLEGG, PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTER FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BEFORE THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS REGARDING THE PROPOSED EMPLOYMENT NON-DISCRIMINATION ACTFelons and the Vote