This morning’s news photos of President Obama smiling and standing with the president of Mexico is a clear reminder that America is a land of laws — unless our president, Congress, and Supreme Court decide to ignore them because they are inconvenient. As Obama’s people spend large numbers of taxpayer dollars to entertain Mexico’s latest thief-in-chief, you have to wonder what the people of our Southwestern states are thinking — and how can much longer they will tolerate being associated with the U.S. federal government.
In this Mexican president — as in his predecessors — we have a dire enemy of the United States. He and his political peers encourage their citizens to become criminals by entering the United States illegally, and use their diplomatic posts in America to help illegals, advise them how to evade U.S. law, and organize them to support the U.S. political party most eager to abet Mexico’s criminal behavior. They also interfere in our domestic politics by pushing U.S. federal officials to attack the 2nd Amendment, and cooperate with narcotics traffickers who are — in their own way — attacking the United States. And the man at the head of this activity is being wined and dined by Obama, who is more than eager to throw U.S. citizens in the Southwest to the dogs if he can hold the Hispanic vote for his reelection.
And not only that, Obama has decided to stand with an enemy of the United States against the one person in America who seems to care about U.S. sovereignty and national defense, the governor of Arizona. Obama and his Mexican reelection helper have condemned the Arizona government for doing what the lawless Washington establishment refuses to do — protect the people of Arizona. It seems that after decades of illegal aliens from Mexico entering Arizona and killing farmers and ranchers; destroying animals and buildings; robbing possessions; overwhelming police systems; and stretching health services to the breaking point, Obama and all of official Washington — including the war hero McCain — believe the Arizona law is “misguided,” though they condescendingly “understand” that Arizonans are frustrated by the lack of progress on immigration reform.
Frustrated? Well I suppose Arizonans are frustrated, along with folks in California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and New Mexico. But they are certainly not frustrated over the lack of immigration reform. They are frustrated to the point of rage by the complete lawlessness of the federal government. What they need, and what by law and membership in the Union they are entitled to is the federal government acting to control the nation’s borders, and most especially the one with Mexico. Americans in the Southwest and elsewhere do not need new laws; they need the president to stop breaking the oath he took at the inauguration in which he pledged to enforce the law. Like his law-breaking predecessors, Obama is smilingly refusing to protect the people of the Arizona and the Southwest, treating them as if their states are not equal partners in the Union but rather shreds and tatters not worthy of the same aid and protection he rushed to the people of Haiti.
Obama has the misfortune of holding the presidency at a time when non-elite Americans — that is, most of us — are at the end of their tether with elected and appointed federal officials who are unresponsive to the needs and legal rights of citizens outside the Washington-Boston corridor, and with cowardly state officials who sit and blame Washington for their troubles but take no action to help those who elected them. I trust that Arizonans appreciate their governor’s courage and that they will support her when the federal courts rule the law in question unconstitutional. When that happens, her answer should echo Andrew Jackson’s response to Chief Justice John Marshall: “Judge Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Arizona’s leaders should defy federal courts at every level up to and including Chief Justice Roberts and his crew of autocrats and thereby make the president act. You can bet Obama will talk tough about using federal power to enforce the court’s decision. Let him talk and let him use it. All Americans will then know that Washington is always on its own side and the side of its foreign friends, never on the side of Americans.
Obama is playing with a fire that could rekindle thinking about secession. When eleven Southern states left the Union in 1861 they had no substantive reason to do so. They withdrew because they feared what the Lincoln administration might do in the future to hurt their material interests and negate their interpretation of the constitution.
Obama, his party, and the Republicans will find, however, that the people in Arizona and across the southwest have substantive material grievances that have gone decades without the redress they have politely and repeatedly asked for from Washington. The question that must soon occur to Southwesterners is: “What point is there to our states belonging to a Union whose federal government will not enforce its laws and protect its citizens?” It is a very good and very pertinent question, and Mr. Obama ought to start thinking about a good response. The Arizonans’ last-resort option — and the last-resort option of all Americans — is found in a 234-year-old document and reads:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
One hopes Mr. Obama and all federal officials will soon take time to reread and remember this passage from America’s most important document. They need to do so because their actions suggest they have forgotten that the federal government was created to serve Americans, not for Americans to serve it. This is a mighty dangerous thing to forget.
