Maryland’s Endemic Corruption: An Object Lesson for the Nation James Simpson
In 2011, we published a report on CASA de Maryland, a Silver Spring-based illegal immigrant advocacy group that parrots ACORN in both its methods and associates—which include the Communist Party USA, FMLN, (a former Salvadoran communist guerilla group, now a political party), ACORN and others. Yet it is one of the most influential organizations in the state.
CASA receives significant state government funding, while Director Gustavo Torres and his wife, Sonia Mora both hold influential positions within that same government. Torres is a member of the Governor’s Council for New Americans and served on Governor Martin O’Malley’s transition team. Mora sits on the Governor’s Hispanic Affairs Commission and manages Montgomery County’s Latino Health Initiative. This is unseemly if not illegal. Torres’ primary source of income is CASA de Maryland, and CASA owes its inordinate influence to its many supporters in state government.
There is no disputing CASA’s influence. At a party to celebrate CASA’s 25 years of operation, Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot said, “I’d like to say I’m here for Mary Kay and Eliseo [the guests of honor], but when Gustavo Torres calls, I generally get in my car and go over and ask him what he wants.”
Torres’ influence extends to the White House. Former CASA Board member Cecilia Muñoz is President Obama’s Domestic Policy Director. Muñoz, who also worked for the National Council of La Raza, has been a persistent advocate for illegals throughout her tenure. Former CASA Board member Thomas Perez is now Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Holder Justice Department. Many of the odious lawsuits launched by the DOJ have been under Perez’s pen, including suits against states’ voter ID laws, Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Arizona’s anti-illegal alien law.
As quoted by The Washington Post, Baltimore County Delegate Pat McDonough put it bluntly: “Gustavo has created a sanctuary state. The governor does his bidding. The politicians who control power in the State of Maryland do his bidding. … And his success has caused financial and personal heartbreak for the State of Maryland.”
When Frederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins cracked down on illegals flooding the county, CASA sued. They claimed that two of Jenkins’ deputies violated an illegal’s civil rights by questioning her, although she had an outstanding warrant and tried to run and hide when she saw them. CASA lost. Sheriff Jenkins stated:
I find it deplorable and disgusting that the groups involved in this lawsuit have tried to defame… the agency and discredit the two involved deputies and drag them through the mud for what is clearly their agenda in attempting to stop and derail the 287 program here in Frederick County.
Paulette Faulkner, an employee of Montgomery County’s Office of Child Support Enforcement, sent an email to Governor O’Malley in 2009, describing routine cases of illegals attempting to collect welfare benefits. She received a stern warning from then Department of Human Resources Deputy Secretary Stacy Rodgers not to complain.
Rodgers, who shares a seat with Torres on the Council for New Americans, told Faulkner to accept CASA de Maryland ID cards as legitimate identification. Faulkner refused, knowing that to follow that order would break the law. A short time later she was fired. She found no support from any legislator and was refused unemployment compensation. In the meantime, an audit revealed some 52,000 welfare recipients using invalid or non-existent social security numbers. A 2011 audit found similar problems.
Last year, Delegate Tony O’Donnell (R-Dist. 29C) proposed HB-28, “Public Benefits — Requirement of Proof of Lawful Presence” which would have addressed the problems identified both by Faulkner and the two audits. The bill reasonably required welfare recipients to prove their eligibility with a valid ID. Help Save Maryland President Brad Botwin and Howard County resident Tom Young both went to Annapolis to testify on the bill’s behalf, each taking significant time off from work to attend the hearing.
Protocol demands that those in favor of the proposed law testify first. In what was characterized as a deliberate slight, the committee chairman, Del. Norman Conway (D-Dist. 38B), instead called a long list of bill opponents, including CASA de Maryland, the ACLU and others. They testified for over an hour, whereupon Del. Conway abruptly ended the hearing and ran from the room, shutting out any possibility of allowing proponents to speak.
Walter Abbott
Walter Abbott is another Marylander who learned how vindictive Governor O’Malley’s state government can be. Abbott is a family man with two grown children and a wife of 29 years. Abbott lost his drywall business due to competition from illegals. He had written many letters to the governor and testified in Annapolis on the immigration issue.
In early 2008, he responded to an O’Malley campaign website, which featured a popup banner soliciting responses to the question: “How do you feel about the job Governor Martin O’Malley is currently doing for the State of Maryland?” He wrote in the response form, “If I ever got close enough, I’d wrap my hands around your throat and choke the life out of you, you piece of s*&t American sellout.” He included his full name and address.
Within two hours, the state police were at his door. Abbott admits it probably wasn’t the smartest way to express his opinion and issued an apology shortly thereafter. However that day he was arrested and jailed. A $2 million bond was imposed on him by an Hispanic court commissioner. For perspective, violent felons arrested for overtly criminal acts routinely get bond in the low thousands. Abbott spent four days in the county jail. Finally bail was reduced by another judge and he was allowed to go free on his own recognizance.
What followed was a four-year legal battle. The first trial led to a misdemeanor conviction, but only because Judge Dana Levitz refused to allow the jury to consider a First Amendment argument. The jury was left with no choice but to convict. An appeals court threw out the conviction because Judge Levitz had failed to explain the difference between a threat and First Amendment rights.
The state retried the case again in 2011 and lost in a mistrial. They retried it a third time and lost again in a mistrial. Finally in 2012 they decided to drop the case. It is worth noting that the original prosecutor, Leo Ryan, Jr., was an O’Malley crony. He is now a District Court associate judge.
Walter Abbott and his family suffered extreme hardship during this period. He has yet to be reimbursed for the $500 fine he paid, and the property seized the day he was arrested has not been returned. One writer characterized their saga as a “war on a working man.”
For someone who wastes government resources for four years in an effort to destroy one hotheaded man, Governor O’Malley can be a hothead himself. Following a contentious in-person interview on the Chip Franklin radio show in 2002, then-Baltimore Mayor O’Malley bid his farewell on air, saying, “On that note, that probably is a good way to exit. And gentlemen, if you enjoyed that, come outside after the show, and I’ll kick your ass.”
But somehow, when Democrats make blatant, unapologetic death threats, which they do on a regular basis, all we get are “whatever” rolling eyes and yawns from their political patrons. The “tweet” along with the photo here was one of a stream of similar messages sent following Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s recall victory last June. Expletives have been deleted.
The DREAM Act
Maryland taxpayers currently pay $1.9 billion to support illegal immigrants. But according to Governor O’Malley, that’s not enough. CASA de Maryland and Governor O’Malley’s most recent assault on Maryland taxpayers came last year with passage of the DREAM Act, a multi-million dollar initiative that would provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens.
This law so outraged Maryland citizens that within three months of its passage, 132,000 signatures had been collected for a petition drive to place it on the ballot as a referendum in the 2012 election. Only 55,736 signatures were needed. Notably the most aggressive petition signers were legal immigrants, including Hispanics, Asians, Indians and others. According to Brad Botwin, president of Help Save Maryland and a key organizer of the petition drive, they were “angry that a group of illegal immigrants would come here and demand yet another service from the state, at their expense.”
Because the radical left can rarely succeed with legitimate arguments for their policies, lawfare has become one of their favored tactics. Thus what followed was a relentless campaign of repeated legal challenges to the petition. For this effort, taxpayer-funded CASA brought in top DNC lawyer, Joseph Sandler, who has made a name for himself attacking conservatives. In the Maryland case:
- He demanded that the Maryland Board of Elections turn over the names and addresses of every petition signer. He got it.
- He sued the BOE to throw out the petitions, many of which were collected from the Internet due to an innovative website created by Delegate Neil Parrott, one of the petition’s chief architects. Sandler lost.
- He sued to have the referendum denied on the basis that it was a spending bill, which by state law cannot be subject to referendum. He lost.
- He appealed and lost the appeal.
- Then he demanded an investigation of Delegate Parrott.
- Finally, he demanded an investigation of Help Save Maryland’s Brad Botwin for posting ads about the DREAM Act. He will lose that one too.
Meanwhile, practically the entire Maryland media and leftwing support network got behind the effort to defeat the referendum, while CASA de Maryland and local politicians held rallies to push for the DREAM Act’s passage and champion illegals.
CASA de Maryland hosted a National Immigrant Integration Convention in downtown Baltimore this past September. Its timing and location was no coincidence, and illegals turned out in force to vocalize their support for the DREAM Act. Yet, to read the press reports, one might be mistaken to think the conference had no relationship to CASA.
As a local CBS affiliate reported: “Tonight, Maryland’s DREAM Act gets the attention of a national convention taking place in downtown Baltimore… Immigrant leaders and advocates from around the country are promoting higher education for undocumented students…” While showing a group of illegals in CASA t-shirts shouting “yes we can,” CBS made no mention of CASA’s sponsorship of this event, and only gave opponents a few seconds to express their views.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake signed an order in March 2012 preventing city law enforcement from questioning anyone’s immigration status as part of an official effort to attract illegals—despite a 20 percent black unemployment rate in the city.
The Maryland Department of Legislative Services provided extreme lowball DREAM Act cost estimates of under $1 million, increasing in two years to $3.5 million. A more realistic estimate is $27 million per year.
Legislative Services assumed about 366 students would participate. They based this solely on participation at Montgomery Community College, ignoring the other 15 community colleges and all four-year schools. Given Maryland’s estimated population of at least 275,000 illegals, that figure is extremely low. CASA de Maryland’s Director, Gustavo Torres, estimated eventual participation of 8,000-9,000 students. In such a circumstance the cost would exceed $100 million per year, and reduce the number of positions available in four-year schools for legal Maryland citizens.
The governor and his allies claim that these “undocumented” workers are good citizens who file and pay all their taxes and comply with Maryland’s small business regulations. This is simply false. Many run cash businesses, keep none of the requisite licenses, liability and unemployment insurance, and do not report taxes or pay market wages. They can and do undercut American employees. Illegals are hard pressed to protest this treatment precisely because they are illegal.
The DREAM Act requires illegal parents to have filed taxes for three years, but says nothing about paying taxes. Yet all of the DREAM Act promotional material deceptively claims these people are paying taxes. This is false. Filing and paying are not the same thing. And a nationwide scandal reveals illegals applying for and receiving $4.2 billion in fraudulent childcare credit tax refunds!
Meanwhile, O’Malley’s campaign website continues to promote the lie that the DREAM Act only applies to taxpayers. It says. “It’s simple. If you pay Maryland taxes, you should pay Maryland tuition. #Votefor4.”
CASA de Maryland paired up with 7th District Congressman Elijah Cummings to hold a pro-DREAM Act press conference at Patterson Park Public Charter School, a violation of the school’s protocols, according to a spokesperson for the Baltimore school system. Del. McDonough called it “an unethical if not illegal way in conducting their campaign, and this incident is one of many.”
Congressman Cummings waded into another controversy this year too.
Election Integrity Maryland and True the Vote
Following revelations of rampant vote fraud by ACORN and similar groups, voter ID laws have been passed in numerous states, and vote watchdog groups have sprung up all over America. The most well-known and effective of these is True the Vote. TTV has conducted poll watcher training nationwide and developed a proprietary database for checking voter registrations. It has had astonishing successes, especially in the Wisconsin recall, where TTV affiliates reviewed almost one million petitions in one month.
But the activities of TTV and the many independent state organizations that have undergone TTV training now pose a direct threat to vote fraud activities that previously passed unnoticed, and the Left has gone nuts over it. In a strategy developed over a number of years, all of the far-left voting organizations have built a narrative around “voter suppression,” to blunt the effectiveness of TTV and groups like them, and provide pretext for legal challenges, when questionable voting activities come to light.
After Election Integrity Maryland (EIM) received TTV training this year, they began checking voter rolls. Of 35,000 registrations reviewed so far, they have found problems with 11,000, including 1,566 dead voters. These voter registration “challenges” were submitted to local election boards and the Maryland Board of Elections. Despite repeated queries about the status of these challenges, neither the local boards nor the MBE have responded in any meaningful way.
But Elijah Cummings did. Late on October 4, 2012, he fired off a threatening letter to TTV, accusing them of illegal activity, threatening an investigation and demanding that they turn over scads of documents. This was part of a coordinated assault against TTV by leftist groups nationwide. But even the liberal Baltimore Sun observed that Cummings had no legal right to demand anything.
Cummings claimed that Election Integrity Maryland had been “empowered” by TTV, as though there was something wrong with that. He also played dirty games, appearing on Soledad O’Brien’s show on CNN the following morning, before TTV had a chance to respond, and falsely claimed they were under investigation.
TTV responded the following day, and offered to meet with Cummings to discuss the issue, but reminded him that he had no legal authority to make demands.
Cummings waited to respond until October 18, and then in a repeat of his earlier tactic, took to MSNBC’s Ed Show, claiming disingenuously that TTV had not responded to his first letter and accusing them of engaging in illegal activities to “suppress” the minority vote.
Not a group to accept such accusations, TTV repeated its willingness to discuss the vote fraud issue with Cummings, but in a strongly worded letter, demanded a retraction of his statements, implicitly threatening a lawsuit should he not comply. Meanwhile J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department voting rights lawyer who now advises TTV, responded on CNN, calling Cummings and other critics, “liars… and they should be ashamed of themselves.
Leftists like Cummings claim that vote fraud is not a problem. Yet the statistics prove otherwise:
- To date, 46 states have prosecuted or convicted cases of voter fraud.
- More than 24 million voter registrations are invalid, yet remain on the rolls nationwide.
- There are over 1.8 million dead voters still eligible on the rolls across the country.
- More than 2.75 million Americans are registered to vote in more than one state.
- True The Vote recently found 99 cases of potential felony interstate voter fraud.
- Maryland affiliates of True the Vote uncovered cases of people registering and voting after their respective deaths.
- This year, True the Vote uncovered more than 348,000 dead people on the rolls in 27 states.
- California: 49,000
- Florida: 30,000
- Texas: 28,500
- Michigan: 25,000
- Illinois: 24,000
- 12 Indiana counties have more registered voters than residents.
- The Ohio Secretary of State admitted that multiple Ohio counties have more registered voters than residents.
- Federal records showed 160 counties in 19 states have over 100 percent voter registration.
- The Florida New Majority Education Fund, Democratic Party of Florida and the National Council of La Raza are currently under investigation for alleged voter registration fraud.
This excludes the years of massive vote fraud conducted by ACORN and Project Vote prior to their exposure. More recently, Democrats have been caught willingly engaging in vote fraud in our neighborhood:
- Patrick Moran, son of Congressman Jim Moran (D-Va.), resigned after being caught on tape telling an undercover reporter how to forge documents to fraudulently vote in others’ names.
- A Texas DNC staffer assisted an undercover reporter in voting in two states
- Maryland Democrat Congressional candidate Wendy Rosen resigned following allegations she voted both in Florida and Maryland in 2006 and 2008.
And despite the vilification from Democrats and leftwing activist groups, even the liberal Huffington Post ridicules the myth of vote watcher vote suppression. They’ve provided a handy mythbuster’s guide titled “Reporters Beware: Election Observer Myths Are Easy to Spread, But Still False.”
Democrats claim to represent minorities and increasingly “immigrants” in their efforts to stop groups like EIM and TTV. But this is a false assertion. Black citizens are not served by a system vulnerable to vote fraud. Such systems keep entrenched political machines, and the corruption they foster, in place. The poor city services, high crime and disrepair of inner city Baltimore is but one glaring example. Detroit is another.
Blacks are outraged at the special deals given illegal aliens at their expense. High rates of black unemployment can be directly tied to illegal aliens undercutting American workers. Thirty percent of DREAM Act referendum petition signers were Democrats. Eighty percent of the petition signers from Baltimore City were Democrats.
Legal immigrants don’t appreciate it either. According to a Pew Research Center report, 71 percent of Hispanics support voter photo ID laws, almost the same proportion as the general public (77 percent). As is broadly recognized by everyone except leftists, Hispanics identify much more closely with the common sense values of the Republican Party, but like blacks, vote overwhelmingly Democratic because of the false perception leftist Democrats have been able to foment, that Republicans don’t like minorities.
The truth is exactly the opposite. Both Hispanics and blacks share the conservative values of mainstream America. Democrats have gained support because they shamelessly promote taxpayer-funded giveaways to favored groups, and attack anyone who questions them.
The DREAM Act survived the November 6 referendum by a margin of 58.3% to 41.7% according to Ballotopedia. These results can only be due to the deceptive, heavily funded, relentlessly advertised effort on the part of CASA de Maryland and its Maryland allies, against a poorly organized opposition with little financial support.
This unfortunately has brought us to where we are in Maryland today, with its corrupt, spendthrift government, trampling citizens’ rights in their unethical, illegal and self-serving efforts to coddle illegals. This situation will only change when enough people come to recognize this fact and decide enough is enough.
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