(The views expressed in guest articles are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of RedState.com.)
Whatever other qualifications President Biden was looking for when nominating Julie Su as Secretary of Labor, competence was clearly not one of them.
Slavic allegiance to union special interests? Check.
Poorly calibrated ethical compass? Yes.
However, if the job application contained any questions about Su’s management of the national treasury, transparency and integrity, either Su omitted them and/or the president was asleep instead of checking in with her.
As a result, Su’s confirmation hangs in the balance as her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee is scheduled for April 20.
Mercurial West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, the Senate Hamlet’s resident, announced last week that he had stern doubts about Su’s fitness for the job. Meanwhile, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and John Fetterman (D-PA) have already missed multiple votes this session due to health issues.
Recently declared independent Kyrsten Sinema has made her reservations known and proven she is willing to be a nonconformist, in keeping with the proud tradition of Arizona senators.
If even one person votes against her or does not vote, Democrats will not be able to force Su into office.
The Republican Party, for its part, seems uncharacteristically united in opposition to her — as it did in 2021, when Su’s nomination to be deputy secretary of labor passed 50-47, with not a single Republican vote.
And no wonder.
Su “served” as California Secretary of Labor from 2019 to 2021 and oversaw the state’s Employment Security Department. Orange County Register Columnist John Phillips wrote, “During her tenure, 5 million Californians had their benefits delayed and 1 million were wrongly denied.”
Amazingly, at the same time that benefits were being denied to the needy, Su handed out between $30 billion and $40 billion of state money to undeserving criminals.
Former state representative and current congressman Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin) called the disaster “the greatest taxpayer fraud in history.”
In all, at least $11 billion has been stolen from California coffers in statewide unemployment benefits fraud, with a potential $20 billion in losses still being investigated.
Of the $114 billion the state has paid out in unemployment benefits during the coronavirus pandemic, 10 percent (or $11.4 billion) is fraudulent and another 17 percent is under investigation, Su estimated.
“There’s no point beating around the bush,” Su said at a news conference. “California didn’t have enough security measures in place to prevent this level of fraud, and criminals took advantage of that.”
However, if it sounds like someone is admitting their mistakes, let’s not kid ourselves.
Instead, Su placed the blame squarely on Biden and his cronies who always do — former President Donald Trump, whose administration she says failed to provide California with guidance or resources to counter fraudulent claims.
“It should come as no surprise that EDD was overwhelmed, as were the rest of the nation’s unemployment agencies,” Su said. “And now we know that while millions of Californians were applying for assistance, international and domestic criminal gangs were operating behind the scenes, relentlessly trying to steal unemployment benefits using sophisticated identity theft techniques.”
Her pretense did not even fool members of her own party.
California State Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat who chairs the House Accountability and Administrative Review Committee, said: Los Angeles Times“(Su) has done a tremendous amount of work on a number of different initiatives, but she has done a poor job of running the Employment Development Department, which has resulted in billions of dollars being wasted and, more importantly, millions of Californians suffering.”
Su also championed raising California’s minimum wage, which delighted her union members but also fueled the fire in the state’s economy, driving up retail prices, making the goal of homeownership unattainable for even more Californians and forcing businesses to lay off more willing but lower-skilled workers they could no longer afford to hire.
Thanks to Ms. Su, California’s unemployment rate of 4.1 percent has become the seventh highest in the country, joining New York, Ohio and West Virginia, and far above the national average of 3.4 percent.
“For decades,” Biden said of his candidate, “Julie has led the largest state labor department in the country, combated wage theft, fought to protect workers who are victims of human trafficking, raised the minimum wage, created good-paying, high-quality jobs, and set and enforced workplace safety standards.”
NO.
Depending on your perspective, Julie Su is either a fox or a blind guard dog. In either case, she has nothing to do with the taxpayers’ henhouse.
Aaron Withe is the CEO Freedom Foundation
(EDITOR’S NOTE: RedState has been highlighting Biden’s Labor Secretary nominee Julie Su’s failures since 2020, when she was California EDD director. Read our coverage here.)
