Hope and Change: Another Cabinet appointee with tax problems

posted at 3:38 pm on February 5, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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The good news?  After the back taxes owed by Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle, Hilda Solis’ bill looks like petty cash.  The nominee for Secretary of Labor became the third Barack Obama Cabinet appointee to have undisclosed tax problems.  Her husband just paid off tax liens from sixteen years ago, a development that the White House belatedly acknowledged:

The husband of President Obama’s Labor secretary nominee paid about $6,400 Wednesday to settle tax liens that had been outstanding for as long as 16 years against his business, the Obama administration told USA TODAY this afternoon.

The disclosure came shortly before a scheduled 2 p.m. meeting of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which will vote on Rep. Hilda Solis’ nomination as labor secretary. The hearing was postponed; no reason was immediately revealed.

Los Angeles County records showed 15 outstanding state and county tax liens against Sam Sayyad and his auto repair business, totaling $7,630. Two other liens worth $981 were released in 1999 after Sayyad repaid the taxes owed, according to county records.

That makes 25% of Obama’s original Hope and Change Cabinet picks comprised by tax evaders.  Add that to the fourth scandal of Bill Richardson’s pay-for-play federal grand jury investigation, and we have a full-blown vetting disaster.  And that doesn’t even count new Attorney General Eric Holder’s politicization of Justice ten years ago on behalf of Bill Clinton in the FALN and Marc Rich pardons, or the dozen-plus lobbyists hired by the President Who Hates Lobbyists.

How embarrassing has Obama become?  Even Bob Woodward has begun making fun of him:

Attracting the largest audience to date at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Ark., Woodward touched on the new president when he asked the audience of 1,400 how many voted for Obama. Most raised their hands, reports our Suzi Parker, prompting him to say: “Now, some of those votes, those hands are suspect. Everybody likes to be with a winner.” Then Woodward told a story of seeing a man, after Obama’s election, put an Obama sticker on his car. “Maybe he’ll get a cabinet appointment—if he paid his taxes,” said Woodward, who later added that the president’s next cabinet appointment will be “someone who fills out the short form.”

Have we had a more incompetent vetting process in the White House over such a short period of time?  When we criticized Barack Obama’s lack of executive experience, even we didn’t think it was going to be this bad.

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