7/18/00 11:25 a.m.
Not So Pacific
Democrats' war on the Northern Marianas.

By Dan Mindus, NRO

hat's what five-year olds say," a beet-faced Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) yelled at Don Young (R-Alaska), Chairman of the House Resources Committee, on Wednesday, before Miller stormed out of the hearing room. Young had just suggested that Interior Department hack David North should have his Social Security number released in official documents: "They did it," Young noted, referring to North's dissemination of private information for partisan purposes — "so what's the difference?"

North had spent his time at the Office of Insular Affairs spearheading a sophisticated effort to tarnish congressmen like Richard Armey and Tom DeLay for their position on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a protectorate of the United States. Democrats charge that the place is rife with sweatshops and crime, and hope that North, "a freckle on a flea," according to Miller, will be ignored in favor of the larger picture.

That's unlikely, because North provided political assistance for challengers to Republican congressmen, including drafting press releases, and did everything he could to get the press to paint CNMI as a human-rights disaster. It started with obtaining personal data about numerous private parties opposed to Clinton-administration legislation, and then feeding the information to reporters. But North also used government funds to hire private investigators to dig up dirt on business recruitment practices (they couldn't find any dirt, but Democrats continue to call these practices human-trafficking); he wrote a memo, sent by his superiors, urging the DNC to publicly repudiate the (Democratic) governor of CNMI when he was in D.C. meeting with his "Republican buddies"; he hired activists to produce a report in favor of the administration's position; and he snooped on private communications between the local government of CNMI and its lawyers.

No one is shocked — not Republicans, and certainly not Democrats — to learn that a bureaucrat in the Interior Department flouted the federal statutes forbidding government officials to engage in partisan behavior. And, as Don Young noted, "I think it goes right from the top and goes all the way to the bottom." Young had encountered the usual stalling tactics from the Democratic Party and the Interior Department, which forced him to threaten contempt hearings in order to dredge up subpoenaed documents. One of these, written by North, read: "My motivations are: to elect Democrats to the House and to punish the handful of obvious GOP sweatshop allies."

Higher-ups in the Interior Department were certainly complicit in North's campaign. One memo, which contained the pro forma warning against partisan behavior, also noted that no one has ever been prosecuted for violations of the relevant statutes. And when partisan activities became known, Bruce Babbitt tried to gloss over the event by giving an award to North's superior, calling him "an extraordinary, outstanding public servant."

This scandal all came out of a Clinton-administration scorched-earth plan to shut down the garment factories on CNMI, which DeLay calls a "free-market success," in an effort to secure union support for the Gore campaign. The unions' problem is that CNMI allows high levels of immigration, mandates a minimum wage below the level of the 50 states, and still gets to sew in that coveted "Made in the USA" label. It is these features, plus a resistance to unionization, that have allowed the industry to thrive. The administration's bill would apply U.S. immigration and minimum-wage laws to CNMI (sidestepping the territory's constitution, which explicitly allows the islands to set their own immigration policies and minimum wage). Support for such a move could only be garnered if CNMI were depicted as one big sweatshop, and so in comes public-relations professional David North.

Along with the horror stories North produced for the media and for Democrats eager to criticize Republican congressmen as the "handmaidens of exploiters," the Interior Department dutifully submitted a report critical of CNMI's garment industry and the high levels of immigration that support it. But a GAO report deemed Interior's work "methodologically flawed" and recommended against immigration restrictions. Meanwhile, OSHA had little bad to say about CNMI factories.

When a congressional delegation visited the Islands, they were prevented from meeting the FBI agents responsible for investigating the criminal activities Democrats still say are rampant — like forced prostitution and slave-labor rings. Republicans suspect it was the Interior Department office that quashed the meeting; North's superiors, on the hot seat, say it was the Justice Department. Either way, an e-mail from one of the FBI agents who was denied the opportunity to meet with the congressmen provides a strong motive: The accusations of wide-spread human-rights abuses and criminal activity are completely false.

Even if abuses of the sort alleged were real, they would be illegal under current law. And that would place the blame on Clinton-administration enforcement, not Republican stalling on new legislation. Congressmen like Armey and DeLay aren't trying to prevent the administration from taking credit for a little feel-good legislation; they're trying to defend an island from economic ruin by legislation.

The activities of the Interior Department display a brazen contempt not only for the rule of law, but also for the choices of the Chinese and Filipino immigrants flocking to CNMI, where the minimum wage is over three dollars an hour — far higher than in all but the wealthiest Asian nations — and GDP has more than quadrupled in the past 20 years, leading to a per capita income that's one of the highest in the region.