If ratings mean anything, the first Democrat Party debate has come and gone with about half the public interest inspired by each of the first two Republican Party debates. No matter, the debate was” oh, so civil”; the Democrats themselves said so, seconded by the New York Times in its analysis. Case closed.
There’s really no reason to deny it; they were civil. And why shouldn’t they have been? When you don’t disagree on anything, what is there to argue about?
US Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
Easily the most interesting figure on the Democrat side this year, Bernie Sanders, a self-professed “democratic socialist,” has set the bar for all other candidates on issues, though perhaps not on style, and, with the exception of Jim Webb (who really should switch parties), the rest of the field gathered itself for the challenge and leaped over the hurdle with no trouble at all—because for them there was no hurdle.
Comrade Sanders’s platform was an ideal leftist’s resume: free college tuition, paid leave, increased Social Security payments, fifteen-dollar minimum wage, the nuking of Wall Street, Black-Lives-Matter (from embarrassing necessity if you’ve seen Bernie’s pusillanimous confrontation with the minions of that group), and gun-control. All that was missing was paid vacations to the former Soviet Union (where a younger Bernie spent his honeymoon).
The total bill of Sanders’ reforms has been estimated at eighteen trillion dollars, but it’s the stance de rigueur of the rest of the candidates, excepting poor Jim Webb.
Yet even Webb’s Achilles’s heel was exposed when he was asked: “Do you support the undocumented immigrants’ getting Obamacare?” Former-senator, former-Secretary of the Navy, former-Vietnam-Veteran Webb hesitated, perhaps longer than the scripted Hillary would have dreamed of doing, and finally replied: “I wouldn’t have a problem with that.”
The pause, as the saying goes, was pregnant. Setting aside my suspicion that Webb really did not believe his own answer, I think it was pretty obvious that every candidate on stage agreed.
Former First Lady, Hillary Clinton.
Imagine the implications of the proposal: free medical care—perhaps free everything— for anyone who illegally enters the country. Webb’s response, when it did come, reminded me of something generally forgotten, but which, I, being a Texan, recall.
In 2009, Federal Judge William Wayne Justice died. A small matter; but this from the New York Times obituary:
In 1978, Judge Justice struck down a Texas law that let public school districts charge tuition for the children of illegal immigrants. When the ruling was upheld 5 to 4 by the Supreme Court in 1982, millions of children had the right to a free education.
“There was absolutely no case law on it,” Judge Justice said in an interview with The Star-Telegram in 1998. “I found no case, no statute that covered the point of law that I had to decide. So I guess I made my own little contribution.”
Quite a “contribution”; if you can’t find a law on something, invent one.
Constitutionally, as John Hardy, an attorney for the defendant Tyler [Texas] Independent School District noted, Justice found “no case” in law that prohibited tuition for non-citizens because no one had ever seen any reason to challenge the right of state in such matters. It was the clear right, at least according to a rather antiquated language of the tenth amendment, for states and local entities to charge what they deemed reasonable for aliens—legal or otherwise—to enjoy the benefits usually granted to citizens who paid taxes for those benefits. But the school district lost.
Former US Senator, Jim Webb.
Hilary Clinton and, if he’s true to his word, Jim Webb ought to make a pilgrimage each year to Judge Justice’s grave. A direct result of his ruling is the mad phenomenon of bilingualism, today’s porous borders, and the oddball theory that anyone in the world is ipso facto a direct beneficiary of American institutions.
That no Democrat can oppose these developments with the slightest degree of credibility ought to be obvious. As early as 1965, Ted Kennedy argued for the relaxing of immigration laws in the cynical belief that open borders meant millions of future Democrat voters. Lyndon Johnson appointees such as William Wayne Justice were more than willing to place the legal imprimatur on the idea. And today the Democrats vying for the 2016 nomination march in lockstep with what is no more than a venerable party tradition, along with a few Republicans seeking the same office.
What is the future of the last and greatest bastion of the West if open border policy yields its likely results? Anyone who entertains the thought must shudder at the prospect. For those whose imaginations balk at the idea, I recommend Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (Le Camp des Saints). Written in 1973, it depicts a mass invasion of Bernie Sanders’s paradise, democratic-socialist Europe, by a hoard of Eastern illegals. To sum up the plot, the West collapses.
Sort of like the Democrat Party today, which surrenders blithely, especially with election demographics and pure power as the real payoffs.
