Nebraska AG won't enforce antidiscrimination laws

What good does a law do when the person who's supposed to enforce it decides they're just not going to do their job?

Jon Bruning is Nebraska's Attorney General. Bruning actually wanted to challenge Chuck Hagel in the Republican primary for Senate because he considered Hagel to be not conservative enough. Bruning has decided he's not going to enforce laws that are supposed to fight housing discrimination.

The Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission says that since 2003 the commission has forwarded 41 complaints about housing discrimination to Bruning's office. But the NEOC says Bruning has bothered to prosecute only one of these 41 complaints. Bruning blames the NEOC for this record, accusing the commission of shoddy work. However, HUD did not deem the NEOC's work to be subpar - so Bruning is basically full of shit. If the NEOC is doing such a careless job filing its complaints, it's Bruning's fault: As Attorney General, he's supposed to be the NEOC's legal counsel.

Now Bruning has another excuse for his own refusal to enforce the law. He says he's rejecting the NEOC's complaints because they were made on behalf of illegal immigrants. This is simply untrue. Only one of the 41 discrimination complaints was made by an undocumented immigrant. The other 40 were not. Many of the complaints Jon Bruning refused to prosecute were made by native-born U.S. citizens who were disabled.

There's several conclusions we can come to from this story: For one, Bruning is just exploiting this whole immigration issue for his political purposes and to silence critics. For another, he's putting his own views above the law. Evidently he thinks you should be allowed to discriminate, so he's just not going to enforce the laws that are supposed to fight housing bias. His views seem to influence his actions towards the NEOC. If the NEOC's cases aren't prosecuted, the commission can lose $240,000 in federal funding. Apparently that's Bruning's biggest goal. He sounds like an activist-type conservative who will use any creative gimmick he has at his disposal to dismantle agencies entrusted with handling policies he disagrees with.

Bruning's incompetence has absolutely nothing to do with illegal immigration, for only one of the 41 cases involved someone who was in the country illegally. He screams about immigration because he knows that gets folks' attention. This type of demagoguery is old and stale, but it's typical wingnut behavior.

(Source: http://journalstar.com/articles/2008/05/13/news/local/doc4828e851ef944677896034.txt)