Blaming the “politics of personal destruction,” Linda Chavez withdrew her nomination to be the Bush administration’s labor secretary on Tuesday amid a mounting controversy over how, in the early 1990s, she gave room, board and money to an illegal immigrant who did household chores.
While Chavez blamed the media for her woes, it seemed the causes of her undoing were closer to home. Chavez acknowledged at a news conference that she initially had not volunteered information about that domestic situation to the Bush transition team when they asked her standard questions about whether she had anything in her background that could threaten her nomination or embarrass the new administration.
The dramatic failure of Chavez to become the first female Hispanic Cabinet member was the first major defeat for President-elect George W. Bush, who is scheduled to be sworn into office Jan. 20.
But it was a significant victory for organized labor, an opponent of the Chavez nomination almost from the moment Bush announced it last week. Unions opposed her for several of her stances, including opposition to raising the minimum wage and affirmative action.
The controversy also was a likely foretaste of a confirmation battle over John Ashcroft, the conservative former Missouri senator who is Bush’s choice to be attorney general. Virtually every major constituent group of the Democratic Party opposes him because of his views.
Chavez, a Republican activist, columnist and former Reagan administration official, made her announcement surrounded by family and friends. “What has happened is part of what we have seen over the last several years of the politics of personal destruction …” she said.
“I believe I would have made a great secretary of labor,” she added. “Unfortunately, because of the way in which the stories have played over the last few days, the fact that all of you have made, I think, a great deal more of this story than need be … I have decided that I am becoming a distraction and therefore, I have asked President Bush to withdraw my name for secretary of labor.”
She said she had not been pressured to make such a decision.
Bush, in a brief written statement, said: “Linda is a good person, with a great deal of compassion for people from all walks of life. Her upbringing and her life’s work prepared her well for the issues facing the Labor Department.
“I am disappointed that Linda Chavez will not become our nation’s next secretary of labor,” he said.
Organized labor welcomed the news of Chavez’s withdrawal. “Chavez’s nomination could reasonably be denied solely on the basis of the many questions that have been raised about her personal conduct with respect to the law,” the AFL-CIO executive council said on the labor organization’s Web site.
“But Chavez is more properly rejected for her consistent and vitriolic opposition to the many laws and regulations she, as secretary of labor, would be charged with upholding and enforcing.” The labor group pointed to her opposition, expressed over the years, to overtime laws, raising the minimum wage, the 40-hour week and federal family leave laws.
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) concurred. “Ms. Chavez made the right decision in withdrawing her name for consideration as labor secretary,” he said. “There should be no question that the person who is in charge of enforcing America’s labor laws respects those laws herself.”
Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) said he found Chavez’s decision to withdraw “abrupt.”
He said he was “certainly” concerned by the allegations surrounding Chavez’s arrangement with an illegal immigrant. But he added: “It wasn’t clear to me that she had an insurmountable problem, based on the information available to me right now. But I’m not privy to all the information she has or the Bush transition team has.”
Daschle said he hoped Bush would use the second chance at naming a labor secretary to choose someone who could “unite Americans” and who stands for workers’ rights, including women’s and minorities’ rights.
A congressional aide said the Bush transition team contacted a key lawmaker to float at least three new possibilities for the labor post: Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.); former Missouri Republican Rep. Jim Talent; and Eloise Anderson, who headed social service programs in California and Wisconsin.
The controversy began Sunday after ABC News reported that Chavez had once taken into her home a Guatemalan woman named Marta Mercado, who at the time was an illegal immigrant. Mercado, who lived with Chavez’s family from 1991 to 1993, told the Tribune she did light housework for Chavez and that Chavez gave her money from time to time, a total Mercado guessed to be about $1,500.
Under federal law, it is illegal to knowingly harbor an illegal immigrant. During an appearance on CNN after her news conference, Chavez said she didn’t violate the law, which she interpreted to mean hiding the woman.
Chavez has also said she didn’t employ Mercado, and Mercado has said their relationship was more that of friends than boss and worker. As an employee, Mercado would have been subject to federal wage and hour laws and Social Security taxes.
The Chavez controversy was reminiscent of the problems of President Clinton’s first and second choices for attorney general. Zoe Baird withdrew her nomination after admitting she hired an illegal immigrant to provide child care and failed to pay Social Security taxes. Federal Judge Kimba Wood took her name out of the running after admitting she, too, had hired an undocumented worker to provide child care.
Chavez said Tuesday that her situation was different because she did not employ Mercado. What appeared to have pushed her nomination over the edge was withholding information from the Bush transition team.
Chavez admitted that she did not tell Bush aides about the Mercado situation early.
“Did I make a mistake? Absolutely,” she said at her news conference. “I made the mistake of not thinking through that this might be misinterpreted and coming forward with it at the first available opportunity.”
Bush aides said Monday that Chavez had indicated she learned of Mercado’s illegal status after the immigrant left her home for good. Based on this understanding, Bush staunchly defended his nominee, saying he “had confidence” in her.
But Tuesday morning brought another troubling report for Bush. The Wall Street Journal reported that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were probing the possibility that Chavez had attempted to sway a neighbor into withholding information about Mercado from investigators conducting a background check. Chavez has denied this.
Bush campaign spokesman Tucker Eskew said he was not aware of anyone from the Bush campaign urging Chavez to withdraw.
“Ms. Chavez made the decision herself,” Eskew said.
A Bush aide said the president-elect learned Chavez might withdraw in the early afternoon in a phone call from an adviser.
Chavez called Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, to withdraw shortly afterward, the aide said, and Card informed Bush.
But at her news conference later in the day, Chavez at first appeared ready to fight for her nomination. She said Mercado “remembers that she told me [she was an illegal immigrant] after she’d been in my house about three months.”
“I will be very frank with you,” Chavez said. “I think I always knew that she was here illegally. I don’t check green cards when I see a woman who is battered and has no place to live and nothing to eat and no way to get on her feet.”
Surrounded by a number of immigrants she had helped over the years, including several Hispanic women and a Vietnamese man who delivered testimonials about how Chavez had helped them, it appeared that she was girding for a fight to defend her nomination.
But Chavez soon stated her intent to withdraw and lamented that “so long as Washington is a game of search and destroy, I think we will have very few people who are willing to do what I did, which was to put myself through this in order to serve.”
On CNN, Chavez warned that fellow Republicans Ashcroft and former Colorado Atty. Gen. Gale Norton, whom Bush has chosen to be interior secretary, and New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman would face even more withering opposition than she did.
As if to prove her point, advocacy groups representing virtually every constituency in the Democratic Party–including civil and abortion rights groups and organized labor–held a joint news conference Tuesday to announce their opposition to Ashcroft’s nomination. The Senate’s confirmation hearing on Ashcroft is scheduled for next week.
“This is a man whose record is so extreme, so out of the mainstream, that it would be incredibly irresponsible for … any one of our organizations not to step forward and fight against this nomination,” said Kate Michelman, executive director of National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. “It represents a serious, serious threat to many of the rights that we work day in and day out for.”
