ONE of the most frustrat ing things about the Bush administration is that its right hand does not know what its far-left hand is doing.
Even though President Bush leads an allegedly conservative Republican government, Sen. John Kerry sometimes seems to stand at its helm. If the Massachusetts Democrat were president, it’s hard to imagine him steering a more liberal course on several underreported issues.
* After a Johnson City, N.Y., parent complained that local cheerleaders waved their pom-poms for the boys’ basketball team, but not the girls’ squad, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights raced to the rescue. Invoking Title IX, which requires sexual equality in school sports, feducrats demanded that Southern Tier Athletic Conference schools provide equal “publicity and promotional services for both boys’ and girls’ sports.”
They also decided that cheerleaders must root equally for boys’ and girls’ hoopsters.
The Elmira and Horseheads school districts argued that team-spirit clubs, such as Elmira’s Courtside Crazies, are de facto cheerleaders for girls’ crews. As the Elmira Star-Gazette reported last month, Education agreed that these outfits can meet federal guidelines by sending Washington, among other things, their 2007-2008 event schedules, their budgets and the names of their members.
* The Justice Department has filed 19 lawsuits charging localities with violating Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. When more than 5 percent of a municipal population speaks a non-English language, cities that the act covers must furnish precinct workers who speak that language. Justice ignores the fact that naturalized voters must speak English before becoming citizens.
Justice bureaucrats “comb through voter registration rolls in covered jurisdictions, counting Spanish, say, or Chinese or Vietnamese surnames,” Edward Blum reported in the March 26 Weekly Standard. “Then they count the number of foreign language-speaking poll workers; and if the ratios don’t comport with their ideal percentages, they sue. No phone calls, no warning letters, no inquiries about extenuating circumstances. They go straight to court.”
Blum estimates that Uncle Sam spent $40,000 deploying 49 federal officials to monitor a primary election last September in Springfield, Mass., even though no one charged discrimination.
* As Congress permitted, the Transportation Safety Administration’s first chief, James Loy, forbade airport screeners from unionizing due to “their critical national security responsibilities.” The TSA subsequently has privatized airport screening at five airports, including Kansas City, where FirstLine Transportation Inc.’s private screeners and their government counterparts have identical duties.
Nonetheless, when the Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America tried to unionize these screeners, the TSA did not reject this violation of agency policy. Bush’s National Labor Relations Board voted 4-1 last June 28 to permit forced unionization of FirstLine’s employees.
“TSA’s defiance of Bush administration policy carried the day in this case,” says National Right to Work Foundation spokesman Stefan Gleason. “Still, NLRB had all the necessary information to do the right thing, and it refused.”
The TSA’s dithering and the NLRB’s freelancing have hastened the day when such unionized employees could arrange sick-outs, illegal strikes or endless labor grievances that distract from their mission: to keep jumbo jets terror-free.
* As columnist Joel Mowbray disclosed last month in The Washington Times, the U.S. Agency for International Development gave Gaza’s Islamic University $140,000 in 2005-2006, mainly for scholarships. Unlike other recipients of U.S. aid, this grantee need not pledge to avoid terrorist activity. Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin launched Islamic University in 1978. Sixteen of its instructors are Hamas parliamentarians. Hamas’ prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, is an Islamic University trustee.
AID last year gave $2.3 million to the West Bank’s Al-Quds University. Just as American schools host College Democratic and College Republican clubs, Al-Quds boasts campus chapters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In January, Al-Quds staged a weeklong celebration of Yahyah Ayyash, “the shahid [martyr] engineer” who, in the 1990s, invented the suicide belt.
Perhaps Washington bureaucrats sail away as Bush remains unaware that his administration implements these policies. Yes, he is focused on the War on Terror’s Iraqi battlefield. Still, if Bush ran a tight ship – or if bureaucrats applied his principles or feared his wrath – officials might avoid this mischief.
With Bush’s unpopularity, philosophical compass and lax accountability standards all conspiring against limited government, federal functionaries appear to navigate as they please.
deroy.murdock@gmail.com