Posted on 05/14/2008 4:37:20 AM PDT by stan_sipple
Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning on Monday defended his refusal to prosecute housing discrimination cases on CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” again couching his stance in the nationwide debate over illegal immigration.
“In Nebraska, like every other state, our taxpayers have had enough, and they don’t want to see their state attorney represent illegal immigrants,” Bruning said on the show, which Dobbs has often used as a platform to protest illegal immigration.
“My office isn’t going to be the free lawyer for illegal immigrants,” Bruning said.
The attorney general has been in the spotlight recently for refusing to prosecute cases of alleged housing discrimination brought to him by the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission. But NEOC officials have stressed that while Bruning has made public comments about his refusal to file housing discrimination actions on behalf of illegal immigrants, only one case has involved people in the country illegally. Other discrimination cases have involved U.S. citizens, including disabled people and single parents.
Bruning detractors say he is simply using the illegal immigration issue for political gain.
“Jon Bruning is making a mockery of our state,” said Lincoln attorney Kathleen Neary after watching Bruning’s television appearance. “He is somehow taking pride in the fact that he is not enforcing our laws. It is an embarrassment.”
Neary’s firm, Vince Powers and Associates, and at least three other law firms, the names of which have not been made public, have offered to help the NEOC in its fight with Bruning.
“This case has nothing to do with one illegal resident,” Neary said. “This case has everything to do with the dozens of cases Jon Bruning has refused to file on behalf of disabled Nebraskans, Nebraskans with families, for the last six years.”
NEOC Chairman Arnold Nesbitt said Monday night that Bruning is trying to turn the commission’s concerns about prosecution of its discrimination cases into something it’s not.
“It is not an illegal immigration issue — it never has been, it never will be,” he said.
Since 2003, the commission has said, it has forwarded 41 cases to Bruning’s office, but only one was prosecuted and none has gone to trial. But, according to Bruning’s office, it’s pursued 22 of 58 cases received from the commission.
Bruning has said shoddy casework by commission staff limits the number of cases he can pursue. However, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which gives Nebraska money to help prosecute housing discrimination cases, has not deemed the commission’s investigations substandard.
The NEOC stands to lose $240,000 in federal funding if it fails to get cases prosecuted.
Neary and Powers have said state law requires the attorney general to prosecute the commission’s cases, but Bruning contends it gives him the option of whether to prosecute.
The disagreement between Bruning and the commission boiled over last month when Bruning said that while the law protects illegal immigrants from discrimination, he isn’t legally obligated to prosecute on their behalf and that they should seek legal counsel elsewhere.
“It’s important, I think, to be judicious with our precious tax dollars, and don’t spend them willy nilly on someone who isn’t a citizen,” Bruning said Monday on CNN.
He has cited federal welfare law in his refusal to take commission cases involving illegal immigrants.
But HUD officials have said that in housing law, a person’s immigration status is irrelevant.
Officials from Bruning’s office and a member of the commission have been trying to reach an agreement on how to prosecute more discrimination cases to satisfy both federal officials and the commission, according to both sides.
But the progress of those talks looks bleak. NEOC executive director Anne Hobbes said earlier Monday that Bruning has been putting his political agenda before state law.
“Every time we make some headway, he seems to take action like this (appearing on CNN), which is for his own political gain, and that sets back our progress tenfold,” she said.
Hobbs said the commission will discuss how to proceed, including whether to accept offers of free counsel from several Nebraska law firms, at its Friday meeting.
The commission already has enlisted the help of a California law firm, over Bruning’s objection, to negotiate with federal officials and Bruning about the commission’s handling of housing discrimination cases.
“I used to be a contract programmer at HUD. That was the most pitiful bunch of people I’ve ever been around, IQ wise.”
A company for whom I used to work also had some dealings with HUD, and you are right: Some of the most cretinous persons on anyone’s payroll work for HUD.
The NEOC is a bad joke. They really dont screen the complaints that come to them, and every ham sandwich is racist. Sending an illegal’s case to the Attorney General was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
No wonder they're upset. /sarc
it should lose all its funding, ambulance chasers use it as a free discovery resource to build their cases.
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