OPINION:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom sprinted to the federal courthouse in San Francisco, demanding immediate removal of the troops President Trump called out to protect besieged Department of Homeland Security agents. Even the mayor acknowledged the unrest was bad enough to place downtown Los Angeles under a curfew.
Democrats see no need to blame the lawbreakers burning self-driving cars and helping themselves to the latest iPhones at the Apple Store when they can shift responsibility to the White House. “It’s a crisis that Donald Trump has created, and he’s doing it to distract from his failed agenda,” Sen. Alex Padilla asserted.
Conveniently for Mr. Newsom, the task of deciding legal questions raised by the deployment fell to Judge Charles R. Breyer, brother of the retired, liberal Supreme Court justice, both appointed to the bench by President Clinton. Less conveniently, his honor was so unpersuaded by Mr. Newsom’s insistence on an emergency hearing that he put off the matter until Thursday afternoon.
Perhaps Judge Breyer realizes that the last time active-duty military were called out to deal with an obstructionist Democratic governor, it was the right move. That was in 1957, when President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne to restore the peace in Arkansas as mobs rioted over the admission of the Little Rock Nine, a group of Black students, to a high school.
Like California’s chief executive, Gov. Orval Faubus blamed the president and other Republicans, saying, “They have seized upon the present situation to promote and foment concern and discontent.”
Eisenhower’s executive order explained that the mobilization was necessary because the “willful obstruction of justice hinders the execution of the laws of that State and of the United States, and makes it impracticable to enforce such laws.”
Ike didn’t bend, and neither will Mr. Trump. “If we didn’t send out the National Guard, and last night we gave them a little additional help, Los Angeles would be burning right now. … It would have been bad,” he said from the Oval Office on Tuesday.
Federal law gives the commander in chief the authority to dispatch soldiers to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States.”
That’s a fair description of what’s happening in Los Angeles. Left-wing activists are using street violence to obstruct the execution of U.S. immigration statutes. Assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are meant to drive the feds out of the Golden State so foreigners can perpetuate their unlawful presence in this country.
Every “undocumented immigrant” who remains augments the Democratic Party’s political muscle because the census wrongly counts illegal aliens when allocating congressional districts. Leftists intend to enfranchise all noncitizens, expecting they will form a permanent Democratic voting bloc.
That may not be a great strategy. CNN data guru Harry Enten reported that immigrant voters, those who went through the proper legal process to become citizens, went from backing Democrats by 32 percentage points in 2020 to siding with Republicans by 8 points now.
“More so than any other group that I can find that became more hawkish on immigration were, in fact, immigrants themselves — immigrants who are registered to vote in this country,” Mr. Enten said Tuesday.
Legal immigrants don’t want anarchy, and Democrats don’t speak on their behalf. Send in the troops.
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