Bush’s house homophobe (continued)

EACH AGENCY head gets to make some "political" appointments, such as McVay, who are exempt from civil-service and competitive-hiring laws that cover the "career" employees who make up most of the staff. McVay is one of about 10 political hires Bloch made soon after taking office — doubling the number of political appointees on the staff under Kaplan, who had left many of those positions unfilled. At least five of that group were hired at salaries above $100,000 — a significant dent in the OSC’s $13.6 million budget.

Most of these new hires, including McVay, have ties to Bloch — many from his Kansas days. Bloch, after graduating from the University of Kansas in 1980 and UK’s law school in ’86, stayed in Lawrence to practice law for the next 15 years. In November 2001, he came to Washington to work for the Department of Justice’s Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

Almost all Bloch’s hires, political or not, are Catholic, as he is — and, like him, most are conservative activists. Deputy special counsel James Renne, who has worked for the conservative Media Research Center and Heritage Foundation, signed an open letter in 2000 from Concerned Catholic Attorneys warning, among other things, that an Al Gore victory could lead to a Supreme Court "willing to declare homosexual conduct a constitutional right" by finding that "traditional religious opposition to homosexual acts is ... a form of bigotry akin to racism." (Renne was reportedly Bloch’s second choice for the job, which was first offered to a professor who founded an anti-gay-rights organization at Casper College, in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998.) Public-affairs officer Catherine Deeds — formerly Bloch’s Faith-based Initiative counterpart at Health and Human Services — previously worked for the conservative Family Research Council.

Bloch’s conservative-Catholic leanings are not subtle. He sent staff home early on Good Friday, and scheduled a senior-staff retreat on Passover. Thomas Forrest, who worked for McVay, "would walk around the office talking about how important going to church is, in effect proselytizing," says one source. Bloch has hired several attorneys out of Ave Maria Law School, an openly right-wing Catholic institution that has not yet gained full accreditation from the American Bar Association. He hired Alan Hicks, former headmaster at Bloch’s son’s Catholic boarding school, for consulting work, including giving a speech at the retreat.

Bloch’s defenders, including the American Spectator and Catholic League president William Donohue, have dismissed all the accusations as anti-Catholic bigotry. The religious affiliations of these officials wouldn’t be of interest, except for the allegations of cronyism — and the fact that all sexual-discrimination complaints have been funneled to this cadre for handling.

When Bloch’s gay-discrimination maneuvering became public last year, this core group became secretive and suspicious of the other employees, sources say. "[Bloch] seemed to put employees on one side of the table and he and his staff on the other," says one OSC worker. Bloch complained to press about "leakers" in his office, and ordered staff not to speak to outsiders without prior approval.

Then in December — shortly after a watchdog group reported Bloch’s hiring of his friends — Bloch abruptly relocated 12 career employees to offices in Dallas and Detroit, and fired those who refused to go, which was most of them. The reassignments made little practical sense; for example, the head of the mediation team was sent away from DC, where most cases originate, to Detroit. Two of the 12 targeted were openly gay. Some were among the most senior staff. None was given any reason for being fired other than his or her refusal to move. A few were offered severance settlements requiring their silence about Bloch’s actions at OSC; nobody accepted the terms.

These are exactly the kinds of retaliatory acts that the OSC exists to investigate. So the employees, with the help of several watchdog organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, filed a complaint with the OSC this March. They asked Bloch to recuse himself and refer the complaint to the independent President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE). Instead, Bloch sent it to another body, the Integrity Committee, which quickly ruled that it had no jurisdiction over the OSC and closed the case.

"Our contention is that Scott Bloch referred it to the Integrity Committee because it has no jurisdiction, so the IC would close it and it would be gone," says attorney Debra Katz. At Katz’s request, the IC chairman sent the case to the White House Counsel’s Office in mid April, which now must decide what, if anything, to do with it.

TWO SENATE committees will soon hold hearings into some of these allegations, but they will also be asking about yet another issue. Among its other duties, the OSC investigates alleged violations of the Hatch Act, the post-Watergate prohibitions on using federal offices for political purposes. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Bloch was accused of misusing his office by taking a partisan approach to Hatch Act investigations.

This hit the fan when Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, made a series of high-profile speeches in battleground states, which struck many observers as de facto campaign speeches for George W. Bush. Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan) brought a complaint to the OSC. Instead of turning the complaint over to the regular investigators, as is normal practice, Bloch gave it to Renne, his political deputy, who did nothing with it until after the election.