Are the President’s Czars Among the 273,000?

Radio Commentary, WMVV 90.7 New Life FM, September 18, 2009
By Sue Ella Deadwyler

Good morning, Jim. Earlier this month the federal government announced a three-year plan to hire nearly 273,000 new workers to join the 1.7 million that already work for the U.S. government. Then, I wondered, “Will the 273,000 new workers include all those czars the president’s appointing? Will the 273,000 new workers be paid benefits, plus the average $172,000 salary the czars get?”

Some say the president’s appointed over 32 czars. Some say he’s appointed over 42. Whether the number is 32 or 42, they’re all hired by him, will report to him and will not answer to voters, because czars do not represent the people. They are hired to do a specific job to advance the president’s agenda. The czar situation is so disturbing that Democrat Senator Robert Byrd wrote the president on February 3rd, asking him to limit the czars’ authority. Although Senator Byrd didn’t ask that the Senate confirm each czar, I wish he had, because the confirmation process can be compared to a background check.

Under Senate scrutiny, we would have learned what Green Czar Van Jones did in his radical past. For example, in 1994 Jones organized a study group on the theories of Marx and Lenin and dreamed of a socialist utopia. In 1998 he went to the University of Illinois in Chicago to a conference where the “Black Liberation Agenda for the 21st Century” was developed and the Communist Party USA helped organize that event.

After his activities got him sent to jail in 2005, Jones said, “I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’” Then he said, “I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.” Months later he defined himself by saying in 2005, “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th…. By August, I was a communist.”

After his background was recently uncovered and made public in late August, Van Jones resigned his job as Green Czar over the Labor Day weekend. He had become a liability to the president. But his resignation didn’t end the czar problem. Many of the president’s other czars won’t “pass muster”, either. Before it’s too late, maybe Congress will figure out how to restore our constitutional “government-by-the-people” and fire the czars. Appointees don’t represent the people. Appointees are hired hands that work for their employers. In this case, the employer is the president of the United States. For Georgia Insight I’m Sue Ella Deadwyler, your Capitol correspondent.