Note: This column was written in advance of the Pennsylvania special election from earlier this week.
This past week, the feds have finally discovered that California is still part of the union and last week, the attorney general appeared in the Bay Area to chide us for being soft on immigration and failing to uphold the law—and thereby, endangering law enforcement.
This week, the big guy himself came to town. President Trump, in his first post-election trip to California, came to check out wall samples, to decide which type of wall he liked best for our border with Mexico and perhaps to raise a little money in Beverly Hills. I’m not unfamiliar with the process of wall shopping because I once went shopping with Karen for wallpaper when we rebuilt our house after the 1993 fire. I kind of see it going like this:
Mr. President, over here we have this steel-reinforced wall…
No, no, much too beige.
Mr. President, how about this wall with crisscrossed electronic wiring?
No, no. It doesn’t look presidential enough.
Mr. President, how about this gray wall with built-in electronic sensors?
No, no. I don’t think you guys understand what I had in mind…
Actually, Mr. President, the gray wall is just a background for what we had in mind. What we envisioned was the name “Trump” in two-foot letters at the top and center of each section of the wall, so everyone would know who deserved credit for the wall.
Two-foot letters?
Well, Mr. President, I’m sure we could make it work with four-foot letters.
Across the entire 2,000 miles of wall.
No problem, Mr. President.
In gold letters.
Of course, Mr. President. We wouldn’t build it any other way.
Boys, I like the way you think. There’s a place for you in my administration.
Anything else we can do for you, Mr. President?
Think you could light up the letters at night?
No problem, Mr. President.
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On a somewhat more serious note, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III came to California to admonish us for not falling into line with the federal policy of making every immigrant—legal or otherwise—as uncomfortable and unwelcome as we possibly could. After all, the undocumented, all 11 million or so, are just lawbreakers and criminal aliens to be dealt with by law enforcement, and our refusal to do so was practically treasonous. What the attorney general neglected to say is that there is a long tradition of the states being compelled to enforce federal law. I suspect he knew it but failed to mention it because in the recent past, the federal law was enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1968. In those days, Mr. Sessions and his ilk were strong supporters of states’ right to be free from federal intervention, a doctrine that seems to have fallen out favor with Mr. Sessions and his brethren since they now control the federal government.
The other long tradition that Mr. Sessions failed to mention in support of his current policy was the policy in effect before the U.S. Civil War began in 1861. In those days, the issue tearing America apart was slavery, and the political issue of whether new states would be free states or slave states. It went back and forth, and a particular irritant to the South was that slaves kept escaping and going north. Slave catchers, actually bounty hunters, were sent into the North to try and recapture runaway slaves. Needless to say, this was not terribly popular in many Northern states; many states refused to cooperate, police departments refused to help and denied them the use of Northern jails, and sometimes, the issue went to trial and Northern juries were acquitting freeing former slaves. A number of Northern states were passing “personal liberty laws” to block the slave catchers much as our current states, counties and cities are passing sanctuary laws. The South became very upset and as they controlled the Congress, they passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which was signed by another American president of little distinction, Millard Fillmore. It essentially said to the North that they had to cooperate with slave catching because if they didn’t, they would be committing a crime. We know that the law didn’t work out very well because a decade later, 600,000 Americans on both sides died over a very amoral and immoral law. You can well understand why the current attorney general didn’t bother to cite it as legal precedent in rounding up the undocumented.
•••
Keep your eyes on today’s congressional race in western Pennsylvania. It will give us some idea on what the future may portend. And a farewell to Mr. Tillerson, who I guess has joined the ranks of the unemployed.