By Victoria Taft and Rees Lloyd
It’s hard to debunk all of the hyperbole and outright absurdity that came out of the Rainbow City Council meeting in Portland when it approved spending Portland taxpayer money to file a lawsuit against the constitutional Arizona illegal alien law. However, I will just take on a couple of examples and leave it at that. I’ll also excerpt some of the emails civil rights attorney (and fellow blogger) Rees Lloyd sent during the live coverage of the vote on the Victoria Taft Show (11a-3p KPAM 860).
I too initially had fourth amendment concerns when I first heard about the law. Then I read it. Then the legislature clarified it to make sure law enforcement couldn’t stop someone due to race.
Legislators in Arizona changed the text of SB1070 late Thursday amid 3 federal lawsuits that were filed challenging the use of race as a factor in implementation of the law. The original bill stated that race could not be used “solely” as a determining factor in whether a person stopped for another violation could be suspected as being an illegal alien. The changes removed the “solely” clause and stated that race could not be used at all.
Councilmembers sounded as if they hadn’t bothered to read and understand the law. Their rationale depended on lazy tropes or headlines on the MSNBC crawl. They lacked intellectual rigor and at times sounded like La Raza had written their talking points for them. This is a serious issue. If they want to take up issues like this they should bother to do their home work. But they’re not serious. The point of this exercise was PR. That’s Sam’s forte. And it’s a sham.
One listener of the show wrote in:
Hi Victoria,
Let’s send the Portland City Council to Mexico without papers and see what kind of welcome they get!!!! It would help us! J
There’s also something else that rings loud and clear from their vote and their ignorant rationale for it the other day: These guys don’t like cops and don’t trust them. There’s no other way to explain their dislike of the Arizona law. They don’t trust cops to properly stop a lawbreaker and properly use their authority to ask someone about their legal status. Much was made about being forced to show their papers to authorities. Amanda Fritz talked of her being a legal alien and having to go to—gasp–Canada to get proper paper work. She sounded scandalized that the United States would require paperwork. I don’t recall if she did, but she should have added that legal aliens also have to carry paperwork. It’s been that way for decades. Why is there a problem with this? When we drive we must have paperwork. It’s called a driver’s license. It is a de facto ID card in the state of Oregon to (now) connote legality.
The coup de gras came when Fritz claimed that the provision of the Arizona law underscores the current law making harboring and hiding illegal aliens was tantamount to prosecuting people for hiding Jews during the holocaust and slaves in the underground railroad. These people have no shame.
As Rees wrote in:
The federal government doesn’t grant “asylum” to Mexicans. Why? Because the feds would then have to admit that Mexico is an “unfree” country, or a failed state, or in a state of civil war. So, the politically correct lamentations of the Portland City Commissioners are refuted by the U.S. government’s official policy, i.e., Mexicans who enter here illegally are not “political” refugees seeking freedom, a la, e.g., Jews fleeing Nazism, or blacks fleeing slavery. They are here because they decline to comply with the immigration laws of this country, and want to have special privileges denied to all other people in the world who would prefer to live here and are waiting in line for visas and immigration papers. This is ordinarily called “discrimination.” It is–discrimination in favor of Mexicans, and against all other people of the world.
–Rees
One listener wrote in with this point:
Victoria,
How many times did the Ann frank family get caught by the Nazis
and then sneak back to their apartment?
Maybe Randy knows
Councilmember Randy Leonard read the poem from the statue of liberty and talked of the white man’s racism through the ages. I’ll let Rees take over from here:
The comments of Nick Fish on the Arizona law brought tears to my eyes — as liberal absurdities so often do. But my question to him and the other liberals of the Portland City Commission who are attacking the Arizona law is this: Why is it that you have been silent all these years about the law of liberal California, which authorizes police to interrogate regarding legal presence in the U.S., but without the safeguards in the Arizona law?
I thank you for reminding listeners of what the Arizona law actually says instead of the liberal fictions which are being regurgitated by Nick Fish, and, even more pathetically, Randy Leonard, who warns of concentration camps. Are there concentration camps in sunny California, whose illegal alien law is much more harsh than Arizona’s?
And as for Randy Leonard’s display of his ignorance by referencing what he said was reducing blacks to the status of “3/5 of a person” in the constitution, what is horrible about that is the misstatements about it by white liberals and black race hustlers. It was the pro-slavery South that wanted every black slave counted the same as every white anti-slavery person in the North, not to recognize blacks equality with whites, but to increase the numbers of persons in the pro-slaver South in order to increase the representation of the pro-slavery states of the South in the Congress. Didn’t Randy the Learned know that fundamental fact, that the 3/5 rule reduced the power of the pro-slavey South and helped bring down slavery, not perpetuate it?
Now that the Commissioners have so self-righteously condemned Arizona, will they vote to condemn liberal California and its more harsh illegal alien law?
–Rees
The Arizona law is legal. It’s the federal government’s law tucked right into Arizona code–and clarified. The Portland Rainbow City Council’s mission creep into Arizona law shows they’re out of their depth, but it also shows a fundamental lack of trust in cops. Cops make mistakes sometimes, it’s true. But for every stop that goes bad that makes the headlines, there are hundreds of cases where the cops do it right.
Maybe that’s why instead of a “law enforcer” at the helm of the cop shop, we’ve now got a man the PR mavens at the Rainbow City Council call a “peace keeper.”
We’d prefer it if you guys would just bother to administer the law instead of the whims of your latest vanity cause.
Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com
