American Policy Center » 2004 » August
- Leader of Foreign Election Monitors Under Federal Investigation
- Foreign Observers to Treat U.S. Like a Third World Delinquent
- International Election Monitoring Group Headed By Impeached U.S. Judge; Group Warns of Election Catastrophe
- At Last, a Property-Rights Victory!
August 30, 2004
Washington, D.C.—The U.S. State Department must immediately rescind its invitation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the U.S. election in November, the American Policy Center (APC) declared on Monday.
APC, a grassroots activist organization located in suburban Washington, D.C., is warning Americans that the corruption and scandal surrounding OSCE Parliamentary Assembly President Alcee Hastings could spell disaster for this year’s presidential election. Hastings will be in charge of the OSCE’s foreign observation team, which is set to descend on polling stations this November.
Hastings is one of the few federal judges ever to be impeached in the history of the U.S. Congress. After he was kicked off the federal bench, Hastings was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from Florida, but his impeachment apparently taught him no lesson.
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel had this to say about Alcee: “Personal and political paybacks are the first order of business for Hastings.” That’s because Hastings put his girlfriend, a disgraced former lawyer who was disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court for “multiple offenses,” on the public payroll as his “office liaison and staff assistant.” According to the Sentinel, Hastings owed her “more than $500,000 in legal fees for representing him during his 1983 bribery trial and his 1989 impeachment hearings before Congress.” Hastings continues to employ her to this day.
Alcee Hastings’ career seems to be filled with political corruption and scandal. The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is currently investigating Hastings for ethics violations. As if that weren’t bad enough, the disgraced former judge is also being investigated by the Florida Elections Commission and the Federal Election Commission for various charges of impropriety.
Now, as president of the OSCE Parliamentary Association, Hastings is the man in charge of selecting foreign delegates to monitor the U.S. Presidential Election. Through his spokesman, Hastings declared that Florida will be one of the states targeted by his team of monitors.
“There is no way the OSCE can be unbiased observers,” charged American Policy Center President Tom DeWeese. Still petulant and resentful over the 2000 recount in Florida, Hastings recently vowed: “Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade counties will again be ground zero this November.”
“The State Department has a lot of explaining to do,” said DeWeese. “Framing the United States as a third-world delinquent that can’t conduct a fair election is bad enough, but inviting the likes of Alcee Hastings and his comrades at the OSCE to hover over Americans at the polls this November is unconscionable.”
DeWeese warns that all states—Florida in particular—are in danger of having their electoral proceedings corrupted by Hastings and the OSCE. “Look out America,” warns DeWeese, “Given his history of personal and political paybacks, not to mention the fact that he’s currently under investigation for electoral shenanigans, Alcee Hastings and the OSCE are poised to smear Florida’s vote tally if it’s not to their liking.”
“If the State Department wants to ensure a fair election, it should keep Alcee Hastings and the OSCE as far away from the polls as possible.
August 24, 2004
By Tom DeWeese
Here’s the line in the sand. Americans can either sit down and do nothing about a planned invasion of foreign election observers or stand for their liberty by saying no. There is no middle ground.
The Bush Administration, through Secretary of State Colin Powell, has given into pressure from thirteen far-left Democrat members of the House of Representatives and invited an international group to officially observe the November presidential election.
Earlier this year, the thirteen Congressmen, led by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), wrote a letter to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to request UN observers for the 2004 presidential election. Johnson and her cohorts used the 2000 election troubles in Florida to declare that the United States couldn’t be trusted to conduct a fair election. “As legislators, we should guarantee the American people that our country will not experience another nightmare like the 2000 presidential election,” Johnson wrote to Annan. The UN leader turned down the request, saying the U.S. government must first invite the UN.
Few, at the time, took the effort seriously. It was obvious that Johnson was playing politics, trying to embarrass President Bush by stirring up tired old rhetoric about a stolen election in 2000. The truth is, after the dust had settled in 2000 and the courts had decided the outcome, at least two separate news organizations counted the ballots yet again and, in each case, Bush’s lead increased. There was no fraud or questionable result. America’s election system worked properly and the outcome was legitimate.
There was no reason for any American government official, especially from the Bush Administration, to take action on the demands of a few discredited, far-left Democrat congressmen. In fact, outraged Republican congressmen managed to pass an amendment to a foreign aid bill barring federal officials from using money to ask the UN to observe the election.
But, bolstered by a few good headlines, Johnson and crew refused to quit. They wrote a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, asking him to make the formal request to Kofi Annan. That’s when the shocker came. In a letter to Johnson, dated July 30th, Assistant Secretary of State Paul Kelly told her that the United States had issued an invitation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to serve as official observers for the November presidential election.
“Who,” asked an entire nation, including most of Congress, “is the OSCE?” For the record, it’s an international organization of 55 nations from Europe, Central Asia and North America, based in Vienna, Austria. The United States has been a participating member since 1990. The OSCE calls itself the “largest regional security organization in the world.” Its website says the OSCE is “active in early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation.”
Apparently, the OSCE is the bunch called in to make sure all the new social democracies created after the fall of the Soviet empire are overseen by the proper authorities. The group made itself responsible for a wide range of security-related issues including arms control, preventive diplomacy, confidence and security building measures, human rights, democratization, election monitoring, and even economic and environmental security. It sounds like the makings of a world police force. And these are the guys Colin Powell decided to bring to the United States to police our election.
So, how well does the OSCE do its job? Well, according to Representative Ron Paul (R-TX): “We should be wary about organizations like the OSCE that seek to involve themselves in our electoral process. The OSCE in particular has a terrible record in the newly democratic countries of central Europe, where it normally operates. According to groups that follow OSCE, this organization does much more to undermine free elections than to promote them.”
In Bosnia in 1996, Paul reports, the OSCE approved parliamentary elections despite the fact that an impossible 107 percent of the eligible voting-age population supposedly had voted. “This year,” Paul said, “the OSCE approved the election of Mikheil Saakashvili in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with a Saddam Hussein-like 97 percent of the vote.”
If that’s not bad enough, in July of this year, the OSCE elected Florida Congressman Alcee Hastings to be president of its Parliamentary Assembly. Alcee Hastings’ district includes Broward County, one of the most contested in the 2000 election. Hastings has not been an innocent bystander in the election controversy. On June 14th he said, “anyway you cut it, these people (the Bush Administration) are going to try to steal this election.” Alcee Hastings is the man who will pick where OSCE observers will be placed. He will also have a major voice in the OSCE’s final report on the election. So much for impartial observers. The fix is in.
And it gets even worse. Alcee Hastings is a former federal judge who was impeached by the U.S. Congress in 1998 after being caught in an FBI sting operation for taking bribes. The Congress voted 413 – 3 to impeach and remove Hastings from the bench.
Now in Congress, Hastings hasn’t changed his shady ways. He is currently under investigation by both the Federal and Florida election commissions. There are also charges of cronyism and intimidation flying around his re-election campaign. Apparently Alcee is a real piece of work.
The question must be asked: what kind of organization elects such a man as its president? And why in the world is the United States involved with it, supplying money to the tune of $25 million? And why have we invited them to observe our elections?
Rep. Johnson says the OSCE is involved to “ensure free and fair elections.” Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican also from Texas, says he “smells politics.” That’s why he and ten fellow members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary Powell requesting some answers. Smith wants to know if the State Department had planned to invite the OSCE even before receiving Johnson’s letter. Smith also wants to know if the OSCE’s monitoring of this year’s election is a direct response to the “contested presidential election in 2000.” And above all, he has asked Secretary Powell to reveal what cities and states the observers will be deployed, as well as who determines these locations. We obviously have one answer– Alcee Hastings. But that didn’t come from the State Department.
The DeWeese Report called the State Department with some additional questions. We want to know what kind of credentials the observers would wear to alert voters to their presence. We also want to know what official authority they would be operating under and what, if any, influence they would wield over the elections.
No answers, either to The DeWeese Report or Rep. Smith, have been received. All of our questions were answered with, “we don’t know.” The State Department will only say that the details will be determined after members of the OSCE visit the U.S. in September. We were told to call the OSCE directly for answers.
A spokesman for the OSCE in Vienna, said the group does not have authority over election results in any way. “We don’t give them a yes or no or grade them,” she said. “But we monitor, we publicize what we see. You can call it political pressure.”
So here we have an international organization, with a budget of over $200 million, invited by our own State Department as a defensive maneuver against angry, radical Democrats still sour over losing the last election. Under that banner, the OSCE, led by an impeached and disgraced former judge, stands ready to storm the American election with observations teams, yet not a single American official knows where they will be posted, what they will be authorized to do, or what authority they will have in observing the elections. Meanwhile, the OSCE is telling us that they will bring political pressure to bear on what they see. Any guesses on what direction that political pressure will take?
The United States is not a social democracy in which the all-powerful central government controls the elections. Nor are we a third-world delinquent where dictators must be watched to make sure they aren’t taking off with the goods. We are a Republic, which means our elections are not controlled by the federal government in Washington, but rather by the states and local governments. It’s the states that operate the elections and it’s the states that certify them. Through that system, we have been holding free and peaceful elections for two hundred years.
Allowing an outside policing agency to meddle in our elections can only have devastating results. Imagine the 2000 election, had the OSCE been involved. The Gore campaign raised questions about the results. The battle went on for weeks. Instead of having it decided in our own justice system, the issue may have been resolved with international observers suddenly flashing their badges and applying their “political pressure” to nullify the outcome, making it nearly impossible for local election officials to perform their jobs in a fair manner. As already mentioned, follow-up recounts performed by private news organizations who, frankly, would have been overjoyed to find a different result, found only that the Bush lead increased with each recount. That’s why the issue went away except in the minds of Democrats like Eddie Bernice Johnson.
There’s more to consider in allowing foreign election observers into this nation. Rep. Johnson and her crew try to sell the OSCE observers as a way to “proudly show our democratic system, warts and all.” But that’s not the game being played here. This is about a political agenda to broadcast U.S. elections as unfair and invalid. The true result of an invasion of foreign observers would be to diminish our stature in the rest of the world. It would intimidate American voters as they pass by foreign officials wearing imposing badges of identification. Above all, it would be an act of voluntary surrender of a major piece of our national sovereignty.
The issue of allowing the OSCE to enter our nation to observe our elections is not about guaranteeing free and fair elections. The result will be just the opposite. It is a power grab of massive proportions. The real game is the drive to erase our sovereign borders and bring the U.S. into international submission. If allowed to move forward, it is the first step in the final drive to bury the United States forever in the dung heap of the global village.
The line in the sand has been drawn. What will it be America? Do we hang our heads in shame by allowing outside forces decide how we conduct our national business or do we fight for our liberty and independence by telling the Bush Administration to rescind its invitation to the OSCE? The White House phone number is (202) 456-1414. Make the call. Your liberty is at stake.
August 25, 2004
Washington, D.C.- The American Policy Center charged on Wednesday that the U.S. State Department has invited scandal, fraud, and corruption to the American electoral process with its decision to bring in foreign election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the November presidential election.
APC, a grassroots activist organization located in suburban Washington, D.C., is alerting Americans to the dangers of inviting an international body to monitor the upcoming presidential election.
APC has discovered that the president of the OSCE election monitoring arm is none other than Florida Representative and disgraced federal judge, Alcee Hastings. He was elected President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly on July 9 of this year. According to its website: “The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly’s role [in the election monitoring process] is to deploy parliamentarians, primarily as short-term observers, and to provide political leadership to the OSCE monitoring operation.” In other words, Alcee Hastings is at the top of the OSCE’s election monitoring operation.
In 1988, The U.S. House of Representatives voted almost unanimously (413-3) to approve 17 articles of impeachment amounting to “high crimes and misdemeanors” against Hastings, who at the time was a federal judge. While sitting on the federal bench, an FBI bribery sting caught Hastings conspiring to obtain a $150,000 bribe in exchange for granting leniency to a pair of convicted racketeers. The Senate convicted Hastings of perjury and conspiracy to take a bribe. He is one of only a handful of judges ever to be impeached in the history of the U.S.
“The outrage just got more outrageous,” said American Policy Center president Tom DeWeese. “Not only has the State Department invited a team of unaccountable, foreign bureaucrats to meddle in our free elections, but these meddlers are headed by one of the most corrupt individuals in the U.S. Congress.”
“While they’re at it,” said DeWeese, “why doesn’t the State Department invite O.J. Simpson to head up the FBI crime lab?”
Hastings is by no means an innocent bystander in the upcoming presidential election. Hastings is a House Democrat who represents Broward County, Florida-ground zero of the Election 2000 re-count fiasco. On June 14 of this year, the disgraced former judge declared to the Associated Press: “Any way we cut it, these people [the Bush Administration] are going to try and steal this election.” Now Hastings, as president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, is in position to seriously affect the outcome of the 2004 vote.
“By caving to the demands of 13 leftist Congressmen that international election observers monitor the November 2 presidential election, the Bush Administration is not only shooting U.S. sovereignty, but shooting itself in the foot,” said DeWeese. “There is a political agenda at work here. The OSCE is not an unbiased team of observers. If the vote in Florida or many other states is as close as predicted, you can bet that Alcee Hastings and his army of foreign monitors will do everything in their power to affect the outcome to their liking.”
Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) warned: “We should be wary about organizations like the OSCE that seek to involve themselves in our electoral process. The OSCE in particular has a terrible record in the newly-democratic countries of central Europe, where it normally operates. According to groups that follow the conduct of the OSCE, this organization does much more to undermine free elections than to promote them.
“In Bosnia in 1996, for example,” said Rep. Paul, “the OSCE gave its seal of approval to parliamentary elections despite the fact that an impossible 107 percent of the possible voting-age population had voted. In 1998, the OSCE observer team that was to monitor the cease-fire between the Serbs and Albanians was caught sending targeting information back to the US and European Union in advance of the U.S.-led attack on Serbia. This year, the OSCE approved the election of Mikheil Saakashvili in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with a Saddam Hussein-like 97 percent of the vote! There are dozens more similar examples.”
“Clearly the OSCE has shown by its conduct and by its questionable choice of leadership that it is not an organization worthy of U.S. participation,” DeWeese charged.
“Not only must the Bush Administration immediately rescind its invitation to the OSCE to monitor this year’s election, but the White House must also withdraw our membership from this suspect group. Alcee Hastings is a blatant symbol of political corruption. Why on Earth would the U.S. government continue to support an organization lead by him, let alone pay 10 percent of its operating budget?”
August 19, 2004
By Henry Lamb
Landowners across the nation can breathe a deep sigh of relief because of a decision rendered by the Michigan State Supreme Court July 30. The court reversed a 1981 decision that has allowed state and local governments to take the private property of thousands of landowners and then give or sell it to other private entities.
In 1981, the same court allowed the city of Detroit to condemn an entire community known as “Poletown” so General Motors could build a new factory. More than 1,000 homes, and 600 businesses and churches were bulldozed, justified by the city’s argument that the jobs and tax revenue the new factory would produce provided a sufficient “public benefit” to warrant the use of government’s eminent-domain power.
Since that decision, tens of thousands of individual property owners have been uprooted in every state in the name of “economic development.” Often, the property taken by government was sold to another private entity – often at a profit – redefining the constitutional term “public use” to mean whatever the municipality believed to be “public benefit.”
In case after case, the courts have upheld these eminent-domain cases, relying on the 1981 Poletown decision.
More than two decades later, the Michigan court corrected its mistake, saying: “We overrule Poletown in order to vindicate our constitution, protect the people’s property rights and preserve the legitimacy of the judicial branch as the expositor, not creator, of fundamental law.”
Since the ruling was based on the State Constitution, it is not appealable to the U.S. Supreme Court. The victims of the 1981 decision are not affected by the reversal, but it will have profound implications for all future eminent-domain actions.
The Poletown reversal is undoubtedly causing gastronomical distress in municipalities and economic development agencies across the country that are, at this moment, processing hundreds of eminent-domain condemnations for “public benefit,” rather than for “public use.”
In community after community, visioning councils are developing comprehensive land-use plans, enforceable largely by the municipality’s power of eminent domain. The Poletown reversal must put a monkey wrench into these plans. No longer can a city simply declare private property to be an obstacle to economic development as justification for condemnation.
If the public benefit from economic development is insufficient to justify taking of private property by eminent domain, then perhaps open space, critical habitat and environmental protection are also insufficient reasons to take private property. The U.S. Constitution does not say “public benefit,” it clearly says “public use.”
The Southwest Florida Water Management District is threatening the use of eminent domain to take Jesse Hardy’s land in their Everglades Restoration Program. Is this program a “public benefit” or a legitimate “public use,” as intended by the Fifth Amendment?
In community after community, eminent domain power has been used to acquire private property that has then been sold or given to a private, not-for-profit entity for preservation. Is this public use or public benefit?
Every person whose land is threatened by any kind of government action should seize on this question and force the government agency to prove that the proposed taking is indeed a legitimate public use, rather than merely a public benefit.
Land-use agencies, at every level of government, should take a long, hard look at the Poletown reversal and re-evaluate the criteria by which they enforce land-use rules. Rules and regulations that preclude land use by the owner are often justified on the basis of public benefit. No longer can this justification be raised without a challenge.
The Poletown reversal has restored some of the sanctity of private property, so well-recognized and respected by our nation’s founders. It is high time the judicial system recognized the value of private-property rights, and recognition by other government agencies is long overdue.
As welcome as the Poletown reversal may be, government has a long way to go before regaining sufficient respect for private property. Still, communities, states and even the federal government are using tax dollars to buy private property, not for public use, but for what they describe as public benefit: open space, watersheds, viewsheds, scenic areas, historic areas, heritage areas, buffer zones, habitat and the like.
Government should immediately stop further land acquisition from private owners, and begin divesting its inventory to maximize land holding in private hands. Government should own no land beyond that required for the essential government functions as set forth in the U.S. Constitution.
Perhaps the Poletown reversal is a good first step toward this goal.
Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization and chairman of Sovereignty International
