Liddy Dole's Regulatory Ride

...As long as a program claims good intentions, it seems not to matter to her how many people get killed, or ticketed, or arrested, or thrown out of work, or beaten up by union thugs as a consequence...

...In 1973, she was appointed as a commissioner to the Federal Trade Commission...

...Justice O'Connor dissented, warning that upholding the law meant empowering Congress to "effectively regulate almost any area of a State's social, political, or economic life on the theory that use of the interstate transportation system is somehow enhanced...

...30 June 1999 • The American Spectator Dole/Bova rd (Continuedfrompage3o) named...

...At a White House ceremony on July 25,1989, Dole called JTPA "the most successful job-training program in history with a 68-percent placement rate...

...a June 28,1985 editorial urged her to give the three states targeted for fines more time to comply...

...When Drew Lewis resigned as secretary of transportation in late 1982, Bob Dole lobbied the White June 1999 The American Spectator LATHY RIDE James Bovard 0 House hard to give his wife a promotion...

...Dole kept talking rapidly, seemingly to run down the clock...

...And the training itself was often of abysmal quality for low-level jobs...

...Accordingto the UMWA, the findings of the Dole Commission were "the basis of the 1992 act...

...We barely had time to enter her palatial office suite and sit down before the secretary launched into a filibuster about what the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) meant to her...

...She adjusted loyalties quickly enough in 1969 to stay on under Nixon, becoming a vigorous advocate of consumer protection in his administration...

...Critics pointed out that fast-food restaurants had offered many of these teens an alternative to selling drugs on the street...

...69-71...

...Alan Law, president of the Mountain Laurel Resources Co...

...Dole appointed a special mediator (which, as labor secretary, she had no legal authority to do...

...The article described Dole's wiggling: "Asked if she is comfortable with the administration's position on air bags, Dole said that because the case is to be argued before the Supreme Court she is 'not comfortable discussing it.' Asked if she thinks the bag is a good idea, she said, 'Yes, I do, I do.'" As Sam Kazman, a Competitive Enterprise Institute lawyer who has fought airbag mandates for twenty years, observed, "I can't think of a more effective way to sabotage the Reagan administration than this...

...special letters are being prepared for the Secretary's signature to Vice President Quayle and Senator Edward Kennedy assuring them that the article is inaccurate and that we are dealing with the issues raised...

...In 1992, Congress decreed that any company, or corporate successor of a company, that had hired any UMWA member for even a single day since 1950 must pay into a health and pension fund for UMWA retirees and their dependents and descendants until the year 2043...

...Dole became a cabinet secretary...

...After Dole cut highway funding to several states, Congress moved to end the 55 mph speed limit...

...Shortly after Dole resigned as labor secretary in 1990, a six-year Labor Department-financed study revealed that young males enrolled in JTPA programs had ro-percent lower earnings than a control group who did not participate in JTPA...

...Jamming America's Brakes Elizabeth Hanford started her political career working for North Carolina Senator Everett Jordan and also volunteered for vice presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson's 196o campaign...

...The memo attempted to justify many of the contracts and grants awarded by JTPA...

...At the press conference, Dole defined the issues of the strike solely in terms of the union's views, as if pensions and health benefits for retirees were the only significant issues on the table...

...In 1993, Law was informed that the federal government had assigned the health care costs of over 2,000 miners and dependents to his company and demanded over $5 million a year in payments...

...The Institute was closely linked to the mayor...

...For Dole, it seems, one photo opportunity was apparently more important than hundreds of bombings and shootings...

...N Correspondence...

...Nor did Dole offer any evidence that any of the illegally employed teens at places ticketed in the crackdown had been harmed on the job...

...In the summer of 199o, Dole declared that invisible ceilings in corporate suites were holding down women and minorities across the land...

...Axing the Eighteenth Piii1=2.ndment Shortly after becoming transportation secretary, Dole declared war on drunk drivers...

...A 1998 OFCCP press release explained that the glass ceiling reviews "study the invisible, artificial and attitudinal barriers which keep minorities and women from upward mobility in upper management levels...

...It described the JTPA-subsidized trip to Japan taken by a small-town mayor and The American Spectator • June 1999 his son as "an appropriate employment generating activity under JTPA" and added that "the son's expenses were justified because he is fluent in Japanese...

...Lave and Elias concluded that "the fatality rate dropped by 3.4%-5.1% following the speed limit increase" in states with higher speed limits...

...But a federal court in 1986 struck down the substitution of seat-belt laws for mandatory airbags...

...A national survey by the General Accounting Office found that the position most frequently obtained by JTPA trainees was that of janitor...

...Dole insisted that she was not for "quotas...

...See also my "Here Comes the Goon Squad" in the July 1996 TAS...

...observed, "Congress harmed all of these [companies targeted for retroactive assessments], devastated many and ruined others...

...When Reagan won in 1980, Elizabeth Dole got a position in the White House public liaison office...

...For me, it is a matter of fairness and equity, born out of personal experience...

...Other programs skewed their numbers by disregarding any trainees who did not get a job, thus achieving perfect loo-percent placement records...

...OFCCP officials often disregard differences in experience and job performance between employees of different genders —thus making it easy to accuse a company of unfair pay differentials...

...Through Operation Child Watch, I want to deliver a clear message to employers, parents, and youth that this Department is ready and willing to carry out that responsibility...

...The commission that Dole appointed presented a report in late 1991, which congressmen allied to the union seized upon to justify new taxes that would pay for union benefits...

...It's taken longer than we thought for women and minorities to move ahead...

...Over the next five years, the number of college students who drank to get drunk rose by 6o percent among men, and zoo percent among women (see also pp...

...Schulz and I asked for her response to findings of the General Accounting Office and the Labor Department's inspector general about deep structural flaws in the program...

...One week before the court was to hear oral argument on the case, the Washington Post ran a big headline: "Dole Touts Air Bags As U.S...

...JTPA bribes for relocating businesses were leading to "move-a-factory-a-day" madness...

...After my exposé of the program appeared in Reader's Digest, the Labor Department launched a major effort to destroy its credibility...

...The tax has caused perhaps irreparable damage to many small and family-owned businesses...

...And if a person who spent six months in a JTPA-subsidized training program held a job for a single day, many localities claimed he was successfully placed...

...This was ironic, considering that Dole's "personal experience" over the previous decades had consisted of receiving cabinet level appointments largely because of her gender...

...About this time, I noticed that the press secretary's knees were visibly shaking and I feared that the young woman might faint at any moment...

...The union also received the rights to jobs at certain Pittston operations, which meant that the company had to fire non-union employees who had been hired during the strike...

...gybe it is my fault that Elizabeth Dole is famously terrified of "unscripted" encounters with the press...

...This is the cohort of youngsters subject to the tightest child-labor restrictions...

...Therefore, I'll soon appoint a secretarial commission...

...Dole's grandiloquence left no doubts about how she felt...

...One state even sued the U.S...

...on school nights...

...Because there is no effective judicial oversight or political control over the Department of Labor, its bureaucrats can act according to whatever fashionable legal theories they choose...

...This was kleptocracy, plain and simple— congressmen plundering the coffers of relatively defenseless businesses...

...As usual, the nonsense started by a Republican administration is raised to new levels of absurdities when the Democrats recapture power...

...Yet few issues better symbolize the deadly irresponsibility of modern paternalism...

...It soon became clear that, after a three-day binge of ticket-writing, the Labor Department had no idea how much of a "child labor" problem actually existed...

...In 1975, Hanford married Republican Senator Bob Dole and joined the GOP...

...In his 1980 presidential campaign Ronald Reagan attacked the 55 mph speed limit, which Congress had imposed on all interstate highways in 1974...

...Dole sold herself as "Secretary of Safety," and was praised in the press for helping the Reagan administration overcome its fear of government regulation...

...The crackdown contributed to one million fewer teenagers holding jobs between 1988 and 199o...

...Take speed limits, for instance...

...Economists Charles Lave and Patrick Elias examined the consequences and concluded that allowing people "to drive faster reallocates traffic from side roads to the safer interstate highways, and a higher speed limit permits highway patrols to shift manpower from speed enforcement to other safety activities...

...Ronald Reagan quickly canceled this edict upon taking office...

...Dole proclaimed that the ruling "reaffirms the administration's commitment to eradicate blood borders and rid our highways of drunk drivers...

...Circuit Court Judge Donald McGlothlin ruled: "The Court finds beyond reasonable doubt that not only has...

...Alas, the press conference necessarily entailed questions from journalists, the first being why none of the guilty businesses had been (Continued on page 73) The Dole report led to a law that ruined many small businesses by forcing them to pay benefits for fifty years...

...A Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial noted, "Many of the incidents of violence have been life-threatening, such as the cutoff of power to mining sites, which means those working below the surface are robbed of breathing air...

...Sanctioning Domestic Terrorism A 1989-90 strike by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against the Pittston Coal company resulted in over 3,000 assaults, explosions, and burned vehicles in Virginia and West Virginia...

...She showed no JAMES BOVARD is the author, most recently, of Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (St...

...A 1993 federally funded study found that JTPA training had no positive effects at all on the wages or employment of female trainees...

...Unfortunately, Dole's bureaucratic contortions on the airbag issue led to more nuisance laws across the nation...

...Dole soon made it clear that the interview was over...

...On March 15,199o—the day before a House committee had a hearing scheduled to look at Labor's failure to enforce child labor laws —Dole upped the ante...

...Elizabeth Dole is revered by moderates and much of the media, hailed as the Republican answer to the gender gap, and treated as one of our most distinguished public servants...

...Many companies, including Burger King and Hardee's, responded to the Labor Department's national crackdown by ceasing to hire or employ anyone under the age of 16...

...Dole's aides later bragged to the New York Times that she had been collecting more and larger fines for worker safety and child labor violations than had any of her predecessors...

...But a high-ranking Labor DepartThe American Spectator • June 1999 73 ment official, explaining the new policy to the Washington Times, said that the agency would decide whether to investigate companies for glass-ceiling violations based on "the share or lack of those people [women and minorities] at the top corporate level...

...Like the federal job training programs that preceded it, JTPA hid its failures with statistical shams...

...Dole's successful fight to delay raising the speed limit probably resulted in ditt hundreds of additional auto accident fatalities...

...The memo also defended the Marion Barry Youth Leadership Institute's use of JTPA funds to hold classes on "government/politics" in the District of Columbia...

...Congress finally deep-sixed JTPA last year and replaced it with a new job training system—the Workforce Investment Act...

...At a press conference she announced that, in the preceding three days, Soo federal investigators had conducted over 3,400 investigations of businesses and uncovered an estimated 7,000 minors working under conditions that violated federal law...

...However, as transportation secretary Dole fought all attempts to allow states to raise speed limits...

...UN IWA International ratified the acts of the various persons who were committing violence but that they have encouraged and organized...

...I told her that, since I was a mere freelancer, such matters were out of my hands...

...Looking indignant, she declared that she had not expected to be asked those kind of questions...

...In her last weeks in office, Dole issued a statement: "I have made this [glass ceiling] issue a top priority...

...Dole thus started the process at the federal level that led to the enactment of a law so obviously unfair that even the Supreme Court recognized its injustice...

...In claiming that nothing had changed over a quarter-century, Dole displayed ignorance of basic American history, not to mention the record of crack-downs by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...

...Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y...

...A Harvard University study concluded that there was no proof the devices had saved the life of a single child...

...In fact, during her tenures as Reagan's secretary of transportation and Bush's secretary of labor—the most significant jobs in her political career—Dole blundered blindly from one wrongheaded and costly program to the next...

...When he bought the company in 1987, it had only six employees, none of whom were miners, and was developing recreational sites in West Virginia...

...government over the law...

...As she later observed, "Washington was like a magnet to me...

...Even the New York Times editorial page was more moderate on the issue...

...When Dole called for raising the drinking age to 21, the Reagan administration temporarily reined her in, but at a June 1984 rally by Mothers Against Drunk Driving on the steps of the Capitol she called for Congress to inflict the higher drinking age on state governments...

...Yet she complained to the Chicago Tribune: "In 25 years...nothing has changed...

...A confidential March 1990 internal Labor Department memo described that offensive in part as follows: [W]e are developing a strategy for handling this issue in the following ways: by arranging briefings for key congressional staff members...

...Dole was the first secretary of transportation to penalize state governments for failure to ticket enough speeding drivers...

...denounced this measure as "nothing short of coercion and blackmail by the central government in Washington...

...By invoking the image of glass ceilings, Dole encouraged millions of women to consider themselves victims in need of rescue by the state...

...Throwing Teenagers Out of Work As Labor Secretary, Dole helped pioneer the playing of the "children's card...

...Though the 21st Amendment explicitly specified that the power to regulate alcohol is vested in the states, Chief Justice Rehnquist and colleagues upheld the law, declaring that it was merely a "relatively mild encouragement to the states to enact a higher minimum drinking age than they would otherwise choose...

...After the bruising primary fight for the Republican nomination, newly As secretary of transportation, Dole sabotaged Reagan's policies on car air bags and national speed limits...

...What the 1984 law really did was create an "epidemic" of underage drinking...

...of Mount Hope, West Virginia, was forced into bankruptcy by the law...

...Since 1984 was an election year, politicians wanted to appear to be doing something useful...

...Thus, some companies face the choice of paying what they perceive as a nuisance fine versus risking being financially destroyed, as well as suffering a deluge of negative media as the government labels them sexist and/or racist pigs...

...Law's company's annual revenue was only $1 million a year, so he folded...

...Dole did not specify how much rotating she felt women employees needed...

...On October 6, 1983, she proclaimed: "It's a war we don't intend to fight with rubber bullets or mere words of outrage...

...Jim Baxter of the National Motorist Association observed, "The auto manufacturers spent close to loo million dollars on the state-by-state campaign to pass belt laws...

...Dole froze...

...But Dole displayed no curiosity about the main drawback of airbags, which is that these exploding devices can kill innocent children and smaller women...

...On March 8,1990, Dole cast Burger King into public relations hell, accusing the fast food chain of thousands of violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act restrictions on child labor...

...Having helped open some of the worst public policy Pandora's boxes of recent decades, she remains oblivious to the resulting damage...

...In fact, JTPA was spending thousands of federal tax dollars on expanding an Indiana circus museum and teaching Washington taxi cab drivers to smile...

...That October she announced: "We're surveying corporations with qualified women and minorities to see if these workers are in training programs, what their reward schedules are and if they are on rotational assignments...

...Fights Them...

...Thousands of elderly Americans have suffered sight or hearing losses because of the federally mandated exploding bags...

...On October 12, 1989, Bill Schulz, the managing editor of Reader's Digest, and I arrived for our appointment with Dole...

...Justice O'Connor wrote that the act "operates retroactively, divesting [a company] of property long after the company believed its liabilities ...to have been settled...

...Congress and Dole chose to turn millions of people into scofflaws by enacting a law that deserved to be scoffed...

...She picked up a framed photograph from her desk showing her hugging a black teenage girl at a White House ceremony the previous July, and recalled: "She cried—and I cried —and we hugged...

...Jobbing the Poor Dole resigned as transportation secretary in late 1987 to work full-time for her husband's presidential campaign...

...28 June 1999 • The American Spectator elected President George Bush sought to appease his former opponent, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole...

...Labor Department officials stated that they planned to devote more attention "to the manifestations of discrimination than to the causes...

...Failure to raise the drinking age would have cost South Dakota $12 million a year in highway funds, and would have cost Texas Sioo million, the kind of "mild encouragement" that most people consider oppressive...

...The result was another nice job for Dole's wife, this time secretary of labor...

...It is extremely difficult to battle the OFCCP—especially since a company can be debarred from all federal contracts while the fight goes on...

...Over loo children and female adults have been killed by the bags, and over 300,000 people are injured by them each year, according to the Transportation Department...

...briefings will be held for public interest groups involved in JTPA...

...DOL officials are proud that the agency can proclaim half of the corporations it investigates guilty of glass-ceiling violations...

...The Supreme Court struck down the Reagan revocation of the Carter air-bag mandate on grounds that the administration had failed to consider the safety effects of its policy reversal...

...As transportation secretary, Dole consistently sought to maximize federal power both over citizens and state governments...

...Insurance companies sued...

...OFCCP audits mean giving government clerks dictatorial power to judge the supposed attitudes of private employees...

...A 1988 inspector general report found that the percentage of young JTPA "trainees" receiving food stamps and general assistance was twice as high after JTPA involvement than before, since the "training" process included instruction in applying for welfare benefits...

...Finally, after much suspense, I learned that a 30-minute meeting would be granted...

...Burger King's "crimes" consisted largely of allowing 4- and 15-year-olds to do certain cooking and baking tasks and to work past seven p.m...

...Nor could she relate the size of the under-17 labor force...

...The higher speed limits quickly proved to be safer...

...Thad Cochran (R-Miss...

...In a 5-4 decision in 1998, the Supreme Court struck down the law...

...The Senate voted to enact the National Minimum Drinking Age Act as an add-on to a highway subsidies bill, and Dole justified the act with studies showing that 18- to 21-year-olds have the highest rate of alcohol-related traffic fatalities...

...the report concluded that federal training "actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths...

...Violations, whether motivated by greed or ignorance, will not be tolerated...

...The American Spectator • June 1999 27 Dashboard Bombs for Safety In her stump speeches, Dole brags about her role in mandating airbags in cars...

...A single minute of work after the federally dictated deadline can cost a restaurant a thousand-dollar fine...

...In a deal cut with the auto industry, Dole decreed that if states with two-thirds of the population would enact laws to criminalize not wearing seat belts, mandatory air bags would not be necessary...

...The politicians must have realized that 18-,19-, and 2o-year olds would not suddenly change their habits and abstain from alcohol...

...And the extent of...retroactive liability is substantial and particularly far-reaching...

...When an interviewer on CBS's "Face the Nation" pointed out that the same statistics showed that the accident fatality rate for 21- to 24-year-olds was almost as high, Dole replied that the federal ban on drinking alcohol "could be extended" to 24-year-olds...

...On New Year's Day 1990, Dole called a press conference to announce a strike settlement that she called "a very special holiday gift...

...In 1977 the Carter administration decreed that new cars must have passive restraints by 1982...

...Homes have been burned, 29 livestock and pets poisoned, personal vehicles shot up...

...Smashing Ceilings As secretary of labor, Dole set policy for the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), which has jurisdiction over the pay and personnel policies of all federal contractors, who employ over 25 million Americans...

...After graduating from Harvard Law School, she returned to Washington and eventually got a job in the Johnson White House...

...The act withheld io percent of federal highway construction funds from states that refused to raise their drinking age to 21...

...Her press secretary put me off, first wanting to know whether the secretary's picture would appear with the piece...

...As part of the agreement that Dole helped broker, Pittston was successfully pressured into requesting the waiver of the $65 million in court fines for UMWA violence and violation of injunctions...

...I finally internipted her in mid-sentence and asked, if JTPA was such a well-run program, why had it given $3 million to finance a gay job-matching network run by the Gay and Lesbian Service Center in Los Angeles...

...The IRS went through the Appalachian states, threatening companies with Sloo-a-day fines for each assigned beneficiary until the company bowed to the government's demands...

...Martin's Press...

...In this, as in her other major initiatives, Elizabeth Dole epitomizes the uncritical paternalism of the contemporary Leviathan state...

...The case of South Dakota v. Dole became another landmark in the destruction of American federalism...

...As Tim Ferguson observed in the Wall Street Journal: "According to 1988 Census data, 90,000 youths age 15 and under havedropped out of school...

...Though UMWA chief Richard Trumka had done little to curb his union members' exuberance during the strike, Dole treated him as if he were Abraham Lincoln working to free the slaves...

...it held election eve rallies to encourage young people to vote...

...Dole declared that the issue of those benefits "is larger than this particular dispute, and I am committed to addressing it, to help fashion a solution in an informed and deliberate way...

...Now touted as a realistic possibility for the Republican presidential nomination, her record suggests that she would actually be more at home in the pro-regulation, anti-business mainstream of the Democratic Party...

...At the time Dole took over the agency, the Job Training Partnership Act, enacted in 1982 as a more private-sector-oriented replacement for the discredited Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), was the Labor Department's flagship program...

...Neither then, nor at any subsequent time, did Dole ever publicly criticize the UMWA campaign of mass violence or intimidation...

...The cop is on the beat...

...Were Dole to win the Republican nomination for president in 2000, it would mean the repudiation of all that the party has stood for since Ronald Reagan...

...26 awareness of any of the major criticisms raised by the government's own auditors...

...Among 16- and 17-yearolds ...the dropout total is about half a million...

...I believe it to be repugnant to the Constitution, inconsistent with sound principles of federalism...

...those activities as well...

...After a pause, she said she did not know anything about that...

...Largely as a result of Dole's stratagem, almost all states enacted such laws...

...She was on the short list in mid-1981 for the Supreme Court vacancy that went to Sandra Day O'Connor...

...the case went all the way to the Supreme Court...

...preparing letters for the Secretary's signature to key Committee members outlining our concerns about the article and providing a balanced view of the situation...

...UMWA violence continued after her visit to the strikers...

...Offered this deal, the auto companies reversed themselves overnight and became fervent advocates of seat-belt laws...

...Ten years ago, researching an article on a federal job training program for Reader's Digest, I asked for an interview with then-Secretary of Labor Dole...

...On October 13, 1989, Dole went to the site where U\ INVA strikers had illegally seized a Pittston mine and proclaimed: "It's time to start the healing process...

...Dole urged that the limit be lifted only for a small number of rural roads — a far less extensive deregulation than Congress eventually enacted...

...Davis H. Elliott Co., an electrical contractor of Roanoke, Virginia, was hit with a 50-year, $2,200-per-year quasi-tax assessment because it had employed a UMWA member for the single day of September 1951...

...The method used to calculate the number of placements varied from locality to locality, which made the national placement statistics meaningless...

...As a result, Mrs...

...Dole proclaimed: "Protecting our children, America's future, from exploitation in the workplace is a fundamental duty of the Labor Department...

...Dole could not name even one specific violator...