''The House voted early Wednesday morning to stop the Obama administration's lawsuits against state immigration laws.
The amendment, which strips funding so that the Justice Department cannot pursue the lawsuits, passed 238-173. Twelve Democrats voted for it, while six Republicans voted against it.
The amendment specifically applies to laws in Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri, Utah, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Indiana. The Obama administration and immigrant-rights groups have sued to block laws in each of those states.
"Instead of using tax dollars to sue states, the Department of Justice and other branches of this government should start focusing on enforcing existing immigration laws," said Rep. Lou Barletta, a Pennsylvania Republican who as mayor of Hazleton oversaw a city ordinance cracking down on illegal immigration. "Until they do, the Department of Justice should not receive one federal tax dollar to sue states."
There's some good news here in that there is a little resistance to the outrage of these immigration lawsuits. The outlook for this amendment is not good, realistically, but at least there are signs of life in Congress.
I continue to like what I have seen of Lou Barletta, now a Congressman from Pennsylvania. There are too few like him.
And speaking of immigration, someone at Free Republic re-posted this piece by Victor Davis Hanson. It appeared last December, and it describes how his area of central California is entering a 'dark age', with vandalism and destruction that the 'authorities' seem powerless to stop. But then this was predictable to anyone who had a realistic attitude about the demographic tsunami of illegal (and legal) immigration in California.
Hanson describes the destruction here:
''The city of Fresno is now under siege. Hundreds of street lights are out, their copper wire stripped away. In desperation, workers are now cementing the bases of all the poles — as if the original steel access doors were not necessary to service the wiring. How sad the synergy! Since darkness begets crime, the thieves achieve a twofer: The more copper they steal, the easier under cover of spreading night it is to steal more. Yet do thieves themselves at home with their wives and children not sometimes appreciate light in the darkness? Do they vandalize the street lights in front of their own homes?
In a small town two miles away, the thefts now sound like something out of Edward Gibbon’s bleaker chapters — or maybe George Miller’s Road Warrior, or the Hughes brothers’ more recent The Book of Eli. Hundreds of bronze commemorative plaques were ripped off my town’s public buildings (and with them all record of our ancestors’ public-spiritedness). I guess that is our version of Trotskyization.''
When these 'mysterious' copper thefts were first talked about widely some years back, my first thought was that it was being done by immigrants. But few people were willing to mention that possibility, because it would be 'racist', wouldn't it? Hanson, to his credit, notes that the vandalism is mostly being done by Mexican immigrants, and that people are mostly silent about this fact.
Hanson says:
''In the vast majority of cases, rural central California is being vandalized by gangs of young Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans — in the latter case, a criminal subset of an otherwise largely successful and increasingly integrated and assimilated near majority of the state’s population.''
He just can't suppress his liberal impulses, the desire to issue a hasty disclaimer that the culprits are 'a criminal subset' who do not represent the 'largely successful, increasingly integrated' Mexican population.
Really, this kind of thinking hampers us enormously in dealing with the ongoing disaster of mass immigration. Problems accompany mass third-world immigration; the crime rate inevitably rises. Neighborhoods, then whole towns and cities, deteriorate. Flight of productive citizens is next, and whole areas fall to the interlopers, as things start to crumble, in some cases, physically so, as in the instances cited by Hanson.
I don't know why liberals, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, refuse to see that they are resigning themselves to this prolonged disaster by choosing to believe that 'oh well, it's just a few bad apples, and the rest are good, hard-working people.' It's not fair to profile or to blame the 'good ones' for the devastation wrought by the supposed 'few' bad ones.
We are resigning ourselves to destruction by playing this game of 'see no evil,' feeling that we have to redouble our efforts to be 'inclusive' and 'welcoming' toward the immigrants who are not out visibly vandalizing our neighborhoods. Never mind that there are many ways to destroy a town or a state or a country, some of them more insidious and therefore easier to sweep under the carpet.
We can't keep on accepting the destruction of our country and our livelihoods and our folk just for the sake of being 'fair' to the 'hard-working, law-abiding' immigrants.
As I've said before in the context of Moslem immigration, no, they are not all terrorists but the ''few'' who are, are using the apparently benign ones as cover. The many who seem 'integrated' are in effect creating good PR which helps those who are not well-intentioned.
By degrees, people come to accept the destruction caused by mass immigration as an inevitability, a force of nature, and they convince themselves that it is worth it because some of them are not so bad, after all. Not all of them are criminals or terrorists. The implicit meaning of that phrase, ''not all of them'' is that yes, some of them are criminals or terrorists. And that this is OK.
Why don't people ask themselves: how much crime or terrorism or destruction is tolerable? A little? Can there be a 'moderate' amount of crime and destruction and displacement that is acceptable? It seems people are willing to compromise, and say that yes, we can tolerate a certain level of such disorder and chaos. If a few of our folk, or we ourselves, end up being victimized in some way, well, that's just life. There's no avoiding it.
This is the way it happens; not with a bang, but a whimper.
Are political means, like the measure just passed by the House, a solution to this crisis? Sadly, probably not, but at least there is life enough in some of us to try to solve the problem, and to deal with it before it is completely irreversible.
