It is sad to witness the spectacle of Democratic California officials objecting to ICE immigration raids in Los Angeles, as well as their failure to either contain violent public protests against them or support federal efforts to do so. It had even gotten to the point that on Sunday, California Governor Gavin Newsom dared the Trump border czar Tom Homan to arrest him for impeding ICE’s work.
Newsom had earlier become enraged when Homan warned that the governor and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass could face federal charges for trying to thwart ICE raids throughout the city.
It seems to us that the Democrats have not yet learned the lesson of the spectacular failure of lawfare to bring Donald Trump down. Lawfare involved the weaponization of the American legal system in order to creatively come up with both civil and criminal violations of law to be selectively applied to Trump. It failed once it became clear that lawfare was a sham, and the Democrats were trying to take political issues meant for the ballot box and turn them into legal battles in the courtroom. Indeed, official accusations of criminality used to be a very big deal, and there was a time when a criminal conviction or even an indictment would ordinarily be fatal to political office.
But the fictions of lawfare changed all that.
In similar fashion, in order to deny President Trump a victory, Democrats Newsom and Bass and their colleagues are trying to transform the immigration issue – which is constitutionally and statutorily within the purview of the federal government – into a state issue, by virtue of the rantings of the street mobs. And given the fact that immigration policy was a defining issue that separated Democrats and Republicans last November, there should be no doubt but that Newsom and company are also playing traditional partisan politics as well.
Yet, whatever one may think about this or that aspect of immigration policy, the prerogative to make decisions lies with the federal government. If change is to be made, it should come via the ballot box, not violence in the streets of Los Angeles. All Americans should be wary of political motivation.
