(Previously posted on Redstate.com)
The headline may not be a direct quote, but it captures their message very nicely.
If you consider the wording of the law resulting from AZ SB1070, with or without its clarifying amendments, and then consider what President Obama, Attorney General Holder and Secretary Napolitano have said about it, no other message can possibly be intended.
Federal law is much less fettered than is this Arizona law. Federal agents can stop anybody for the express purpose of “checking their papers.” AZ 1070 does not allow that; Arizona police must first have made contact in the enforcement of a different law before asking for proof of legal presence. Federal agents need not have any reason for their request for ID at all, beyond their own “WeSaySo.” That is, Federal agents need not meet any burden of having a “reasonable suspicion or belief” that they are dealing with illegal aliens before asking for ID. AZ 1070 requires that the officer must have such a suspicion before even asking for proof of legal presence. And finally, Federal law requires a legal foreign resident to carry his green card at all times. The Arizona law specifies that if the person in question has an Arizona driver’s license, that is sufficient and no more documentation may be legally sought.
Yet with all that, the President, the AG, and the Secretary of Homeland Security have all condemned the Arizona law without reading it, saying that it “has the potential” to result in racial profiling, and the Democrats in the US Congress gave Mexican President Calderon a standing ovation for even worse remarks. At one point he claimed the law “institutes the terrible idea that racial profiling is the basis for law (garbled).”
Following that lead, commentator Kirsten Powers on Fox News Sunday asserted that, “Lawful contact can be anything…. Police can find a lot of different ways to [make a lawful stop]…. They could use that as an opportunity to say, ‘Oh, look, here’s a bunch of Hispanic people standing there, I’m going to find a reason to go up to them….’” When Brit Hume interrupted her to point out that the law specifically prohibits that action, she went on to say, “They [police] would not say that to the judge, they would say that ‘They were doing something that I thought was suspicious,’” and her example was that the person being questioned walked away after being spoken to.
When Brit pointed out that Federal law has none of the safeguards of the Arizona law, she brushed that aside with the airhead comment that “I haven’t really heard of that [stops by Federal agents for immigration checks] being an issue.”
What can be inferred from the public statements and the above exchange? See the headline. After all, there is no uproar about the more draconian Federal law which AZ 1070 emulates. There is no outcry that Federal agents “might” use racial profiling to arrest an illegal alien. There seems to be no fear that ICE agents will lie to the judge to make an arrest stick. There isn’t even any comment about the similar California law that’s been on the books, ignored, for years. It’s only Arizona police who will do these things, who will circumvent the law as written and perjure themselves in court, at least so say the Democrats. Logically, they must think that Arizona police are racist pigs.
Make no mistake, those things do happen, but they happen all over the country, on rare occasions, and the officers committing those offenses are not restricted to local and state agencies, and certainly not restricted to Arizona. A Federal officer can offend as easily as anyone else.
Eliminating the ditz factor, we must ask ourselves Why are our senior officials saying these things while claiming to have “not read” the Arizona law?
First, if they haven’t read it they can always claim to have been misinformed when the time to face reality is convenient. Second, by making a big fuss about Arizona, they have postponed the day of reckoning, the day that they have to actually face up to the problem of our wide open borders. They are continuing to Blame America First while they do nothing to solve the real problem.
In other words, they are trying to distract our attention from the situation that the Arizona law was passed to address–the citizens of Arizona are not safe, because of illegal aliens in the form of drug cartels who cross into the USA daily with impunity. The law itself will actually change very little, but the rabid opposition to it tells us a lot about those who oppose it. They’re more interested in promoting their own agenda than in enforcing federal law or in protecting citizens from criminals. Thus, they often include a call for “comprehensive” immigration reform, ignoring the fact that this law is not an immigration law but a statute that mandates enforcement of existing federal and state law.
The attacks on Arizona by the administration are personalized and polarizing. Imagine that, Saul Alinsky. They change the dialogue from “search for a solution” to “who should we condemn.” They change the issue from “protection for American citizens and both legal and illegal residents” to “fear of state and local law enforcement agencies.” If the President had not taken this approach, he would have been forced to either agree with Arizona and address the open border issue or be left with even the lamestream media asking him why he wasn’t doing so. For him, that question is unanswerable because the reason is political and he can’t admit that everything he does has a political reason behind it. And he can’t address the border issue directly as it should be addressed because his base supporters wouldn’t stand for it.
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