Holder’s Hack Job
The New York Post
October 24, 2011
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/holder_hack_job_4987iuWkWpan1BhlQRHA9K
You’d think the US Justice Department would have better things to do (what with its Fast & Furious scandal, Solyndra, Gitmo terrorists ...) than micromanage New York City taxicab design.
No such luck.
The US attorney’s office in Manhattan just filed a 23-page court brief insisting that (get this!) all new taxis be built to accommodate wheelchairs.
It claimed the city just doesn’t have enough such cabs right now, in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Jeez Louise! Is there no matter too minute -- or local -- to concern the all-powerful Department of Justice of the United States of America? What will it try to dictate next -- taxi tire-tread depths?
Justice’s ridiculously naive position on cabs itself shows how inappropriate it is for federal outsiders to butt in to city business.
Take its chief gripe: insufficient service for the disabled. Fact is, there are just 6,000 people or so with non-folding wheelchairs in the entire city, mayoral aides estimate.
A city, that is, of more than 8 million.
No wonder there’s barely any demand for wheelchair-ready cabs: When City Hall ran a two-year test not long ago, allowing riders to phone for them, hardly any did. (The record for a day: a whopping 15 calls.)
Anyway, as Mayor Bloomberg notes, dispatching such cabs makes far more sense than flooding streets with them -- not that Justice’s legal eagles would understand.
“You know, the Justice Department, I don’t think, has ever been to New York,” Bloomberg joked. “You go out in the streets -- you just cannot take, generally, a wheelchair out into the street and try to hail a cab. It’s dangerous.”
No kidding. Which is why the city plans to roll out a new dispatch system for wheelchair cabs in just a few months.
Meanwhile, some 230 cabs, meant exclusively for wheelchairs, already hunt the streets in desperate search of those elusive 6,000 theoretical fares.
Yet meddling by Justice’s busybody barristers isn’t new. This is the same agency, recall, that first went after the FDNY, alleging (on wholly specious grounds) that its entrance exams were racist.
The result: A federal judge is now trying to run the entire Fire Department himself.
And that’s only a small exaggeration: After having appointed himself chief FDNY exam-designer, Judge Nick Garaufis last week actually busied himself with interviewing candidates to monitor department hiring. (How long before he shows up at the scenes of fires, instructing firefighters on how to aim their hoses?)
And there was the time Justice sued on behalf of three women who sought bridge-painting jobs (two were unqualified; the city couldn’t produce notes on the third).
It just never ends.
We’d have thought that Attorney General Eric Holder had enough on his plate fending off subpoenas tied to the Fast & Furious gun-running fiasco. Or figuring out what to do with Guantanamo Bay terrorists.
Guess not. Too bad for New York.
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