week amid mounting republican opposition. wall street journal editorial board member mary kissle has been following the story for us from the beginning and joins us now. why is this nomination so sdmefrl. several reasons. mr. perez is head of the civil rights division at the justice department. he was using a shaky legal theory to ecotract settlement out of banks. mr. perez did a deal with the city to get the case with drawn from the supreme court? from the supreme court docket. this was a case that st. paul had been litigating for how long? almost a decade. in addition the feds brought two claims again whistle blowers that could have brought home as much as $200 million to taxpayers but that wasn t all. he was after south carolina s voice recorder i.d. law was confirm voter i.d. law was confirmed by a court, he harassed the state. that s just the beginning, paul.
time for hits and misses of the week. mary, first to you. i m giving a big hit to bhoef this week met a cuban dissident, one of the founding members of the ladies in white. the ladies who peacefully protest the brutal castro regime under threat of beatings, jailings or death. what a shot in the arm for cuba s democracy movement to have that photo taken. and a really welcome one given that president obama and even the previous pope have shunned the ladies. so shame on them and bully for post. all right. this is steven s theory of intellectual relativity which is a great genius does not equal good judgment. steven hawk, well-known physicist from cambridge decided to join an academic boycott of israel this week.
rights division at the justice department will have questions to answer, but the doj s decision to drop that now infamous voter intimidation case against the new black panther party, as well as a case headed to the supreme court that could have struck down his legal theories on racial discrimination, for more we re joined by editorial board member mary kissle and political diary editor jason riley. mary, you broke the story a year ago about the involvement in the st. paul case, we ve since discovered a lot more details thanks to your digging. why did perez get himself involved in in case? well, the city of st. paul, minnesota was challenging, a theory of racial discrimination that tom perez and the justice department were using to accuse banks of discrimination, and so, he feared that if the court struck down this particular rule, that he would have to stop doing that, it would cut off a big source of funding, actually, for the justice department. so he leaned on st. paul to
and if mr. perez goes into that job and uses these statistically based theories against the workplace, then we will have difficulties. paul: mary, how likely do you think it s going to be become what we ve talked about, the black panther case, but more importantly, the perez case, extraordinary intervention in the judiciary, will become an issue and could complicate his confirmation. we ve already had a couple of senators raise questions about him, including chuck glassry, looking at the st. paul streak case for a long time. vitter of louisiana as well. and this is a practice that perez has been been using more than decades throughout his career and seems to view the law as something that s malable and incidentally if it conflicts with his goals. paul: we ll be following this one. when we come back, fresh off the big soda smackdown, mayor
so, mary, the mayor would say, look, sometimes the people need to be led, even though some people call him a nanny mayor for it. what do you think? yeah, well, where is the evidence that this is going to lead to better health outcomes and why do we need government hiding products from us? what s next? is he going to hide the beer? is he going to hide the big macs and mcdonald s? look, it s much better to empower consumers than to try to nudge them in the right direction which he seems to be trying. paul: he would say he has public proof. in the campaign against cigarettes and trans fats and that new york outcomes are better and sometimes the public needs to be led in the right direction and sometimes yanked. i think the mayor needs to be reminded of the concept of a free society. he s acting like a joe stalin. joe stalin, don t you think that s a tad well, if bloomberg (laughter) public health is a good.