The race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Nebraska is pretty straight-forward. Don Stenberg is a genuine, lifelong conservative with a great record while his opponent, Jon Bruning, has a very questionable habit of supporting liberals and liberal ideas. Last week we learned that Bruning not only supported President Obama’s controversial nomination of Eric Holder to be Attorney General, but he won’t back down from that support in light of Holder’s abysmal record. Now we learn that Bruning also supported known liberal activist Thomas Perez to be Assistant Attorney General and head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. There apparently is no end to Bruning’s love of the Obama Justice Department. In a 2010 letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Bruning joined with three fellow attorneys general to advocate on behalf of Perez. They wrote:

“[Perez] is a nationally recognized civil rights lawyer whose breadth and depth of experience make him an ideal choice to lead the Civil Rights Division,” and “[w]e are confident that Mr. Perez would be an exceptional Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division and urge you to consider his nomination.”

I assume by “breadth and depth of experience,” Bruning was referring to Perez’s tenure as lawyer for Ted Kennedy? Or his experience in the Clinton DOJ? Or his volunteer activities for CASA de Maryland, a leftist advocacy group for illegal aliens? I guess it doesn’t matter to Bruning that the group is funded by George Soros and Hugo Chavez?

The Civil Rights Division is extremely powerful — responsible for enforcement of our nation’s many federal civil rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act — and its leadership must enforce the law, not treat the organization like the ACLU or MALDEF. But that is not how Thomas Perez sees it. Since he was confirmed by the Senate (with 22 opposing Republican votes), he has embarked on a crusade to impose by fiat the will of the Obama/Holder/Perez regime. Most recently, he and his department brazenly decided to not “pre-clear” the Texas Voter ID law passed by an overwhelming majority of the Texas legislature and modeled after the Indiana law that the Supreme Court has already blessed. This, of course was not the first time Perez misapplied Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (the reauthorized version of which is dubiously constitutional). Perez and company also denied South Carolina and are looking at other states. But it gets worse. Perez also has targeted states which have dared to enforce the very federal immigration laws that the Obama administration very purposefully fails to enforce. Specifically, he led the charge against Arizona’s immigration law. And he won’t stop there. He has aggressively pursued so-called “disparate impact” discrimination cases in areas such as mortgage lending and has novel theories on how to expand hate crime enforcement and numerous other areas. In some ways, Perez makes Eric “Fast and Furious” Holder seem timid and reserved in his leftist ideology. So, if Jon Bruning won’t back down from supporting Eric Holder… will he at least admit that his support for Thomas Perez was a mistake?