Kenneth Marcus, president and founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, was nominated by President Trump in October to serve as assistant secretary of education for civil rights at the Department of Education.
Marcus worked in a similar capacity during the Bush administration, serving with delegated authority in the same position and as staff director at the Commission on Civil Rights.
Since the announcement of his nomination, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement activists have orchestrated a campaign to oppose Marcus, seeking to cast him as an enemy of free speech in higher education (a concern apparently shared by these writers).
Writing for the Jewish News Service, Sarah Stern offered a staunch defense of Marcus’ record. In her Tuesday article, Stern reported that a senior Democratic Senate committee staffer made a bizarre statement while they were discussing Marcus’ nomination. From Stern’s account:
…while I was recently talking about Marcus with a senior policy adviser to the Democratic ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, the adviser interrupted me with the response, ‘We do not care about anti-Semitism in this office.’
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is the ranking Democrat on the upper chamber’s HELP committee. That one of her senior policy advisers would flatly tell a pro-Israel advocate the office does not care about anti-Semitism seems almost unbelievably absurd.
The ranking member’s communications office did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment as to whether the aide in question has been identified, whether there are plans to verify if the statement was made, or whether that viewpoint represents the attitude among Democrats on the committee.
One would think Murray and her staff might be interested enough to at least investigate whether one of their senior policy advisers actually made such a statement.
UPDATE: Eli Zupnick, Sen. Murray’s communications director, told the Washington Examiner, “This is not an accurate quote and certainly doesn’t reflect the position of the office.”
