The Democrats have quietly slipped a lot of changes into law. Changes the WSJ says are piling up.

Here’s the money quote:

Senior White House political adviser David Axelrod said
his opponents in Congress are absorbed with defeating Mr. Obama’s
health-care overhaul, what he calls “the shiny object that they’ve
chased.” As a result, he contends, other measures have been left to
pass into law.

Like a shell game, maybe? That’s the idea that even some Republicans admit has worked.

Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.), a conservative leader in the
House, concedes that, in some cases, Republicans are being outflanked.
“The administration is pushing so many things so rapidly it’s difficult
to concentrate on all of them,” he said.

Like what?

Last week, Mr. Obama signed defense-policy legislation
that included an unrelated measure widening federal hate-crimes laws to
cover sexual orientation and gender identification — 12 years after it
was first introduced. The same legislation also tightened the rules of
admissible evidence for military commissions, an issue that consumed
Congress in debate in 2007 but received almost no attention this
go-round…

The legislation gives the Justice Department the power to
investigate and prosecute an expanded definition of hate crimes and to
pre-empt local police when Washington decides too little is being done
about a crime. The legislation has long been controversial. In fact, it
took 14 votes in Congress to pass it. Opponents believe the measure is
an unwarranted expansion of federal power. They also say it creates a
new category of violent crime that isn’t necessary because the acts it
addresses would be crimes regardless of motivation. Mr. Price, the
congressman, called it an “unconstitutional thought-crimes law.”

Which is why it had to be slipped in under cover of the Defense Authorization Act.

Sen. Harry Reid slipped the hate-crime legislation into
the defense authorization bill to avoid having to have senators
consider the controversial bill on its own.

It’s for good reason that Democratic legislators wanted to hide
under a rock while passing this terrible piece of legislation. It may
help them with the far-left wing of their party. But weakening and
damaging our country is not something to be proud of. And that is
exactly what this new law does.

As the WSJ said, it wasn’t necessary.

Equal protection for every individual American under the
law is what the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution, passed after
the Civil War, guarantees. That this nation takes this guarantee
seriously – that there are no classes of individuals that are treated
differently under the law – has been a justifiable obsession of blacks.

A society in which all life is not valued the same, where murder of
one citizen is not the same as murder of another citizen, is a horror
which black Americans have known too well.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Is it not a sign of our own pathology that we now have
codified that it is worse to murder a homosexual than someone who has
committed adultery, even with your husband or wife, or who has
slandered or robbed? Isn’t the point murder?

It should be clear that hate-crime legislation has nothing to do
with improving our law but rather with creating favored political
classes. This should be hateful to everyone who cares about a free
society – particularly to those, such as blacks, who have been so
victimized by politicization of law.

As Parker points out, the same moral relativism drives both racism
and politicized laws like this one. And these lawmakers are mistaking
the disease for the cure.