Rand Paul is already crashing and burning. Did you notice? Here's how it went down: first, he unmistakably suggested that he opposed Title II of the Civil Rights Act. Then he tried unsuccessfully to weasel his way out, under near-implacable questioning. This was when people got really worked up. So Paul put out a press release, the strategy of which was more or less to deny that the previous 24 hours had happened.
But there are people, including FOX news commentators, who are lined up to defend him. The basic claim is that, while Paul was of course wrong to oppose civil rights legislation, it was an honest and “respectable” mistake. As Dave Weigel said, "Rand doesn't mean harm; he is suffering as the libertarian debate moves into prime time." Various Republicans have made arguments similar to Weigel's. It was a mere “theoretical” idea, they say, and nothing should be made of it. A staffer for Senator Jim DeMint, R-SC, calls the whole thing "a non-issue." Only old white guys would declare the whole civil rights thing as not important – Republican old white guys!
Now, fresh off his 24-hour news cycle disaster in which he questioned the basis for the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, Paul is taking his fringe libertarianism even further. Paul rejects the notion that the President of the United States should hold private corporations accountable for the havoc they wreck on our country, such as BP Oil and Massey Energy!
In Paul’s libertarian world, private companies and private property owners should be able to do as they please without federal interference. Apparently the concept of civil and criminal negligence is beyond Paul, because his response to the Gulf oil spill and the Massey Energy mining disaster was “sometimes accidents happen.”
Rand Paul is not ready for prime time. The far right-wing libertarian, tea party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky has immature, not-very-well-thought-out views. It's not just that he is saying stupid things because he is so committed to a purist stance. No, it's worse. Libertarianism itself is what is naïve here, not just Rand Paul. We should stop tip-toeing around this belief system as if its adherents are ancient revered nobles clinging to their proud ways. These are immature people hankering for the old Wild West where there were no rules.
It's time to stop taking libertarianism seriously. Ironically, the best way into this point comes from another brilliant libertarian, legal scholar Richard Epstein: "To be against Title II in 1964 would be to be brain-dead to the underlying realities of how this world works."
That’s the key: "the underlying realities of how the world works." Rand Paul’s views are not based in reality.
Most capitalist enterprise in this country has been ultimately underwritten by the government. This is true at an obvious level that even most libertarians would concede: for the system to work, you need some kind of bare bones apparatus for enforcing contracts and protecting property. Businesses are also often given tax breaks, city-built infrastructure, and other sweetheart deals just to locate in certain places. We could fill a library with the details of the underwriting from the states and the federal government enjoyed by American business.
Libertarians like Paul are walking around with the fanciful idea in their heads that the world could just snap back to a “natural” benign order if the government stopped interfering. For example, Paul thinks that we do not need Title II of the Civil Rights Acts because “good” people wouldn't shop at the racist stores, therefore there wouldn't be any racist stores. Yeah, right. He is living in never-never land with Peter Pan.
This is the belief system of people who have been the recipients of massive government backing for their entire lives. Although libertarians will never admit it, without the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, there might not be private property or private businesses left for them to complain about the government infringing on. Not many capitalist democracies could survive 20 to 25 percent unemployment like the United States did during the Great Depression without government help. It doesn't just happen by good luck. We have seen whole countries crumble when their government cannot or will not help.
Take a couple more recent examples:
Savvy health insurance executives were quite aware that if reform had failed, skyrocketing prices were likely to doom the whole system of private insurance and bring on single-payer.
Imagine the moment in, say, twenty years, when the evidence of climate change has become undeniable, and there’s an urgent crackdown on carbon-intensive industries. Then coal companies and agribusiness will be wishing they’d gotten on board with the mild, slow-moving reform that is cap-and-trade.
Do you get it? The government helped to make the "free market." It's also constantly trimming around the edges to keep it healthy. The state can think ahead and balance competing interests in a way that no single company can or cares to.
The libertarian who insists that the state has no place beyond basic night-watchman duties is like a teenager who, having been given a car, promptly thinks no rules should apply to him and starts demanding the right to stay out all night. Sometimes, someone else really is looking out for your best interests by saying no. (This isn't to say the state is looking out for the best interests of everybody, or even most people.)
The point is just that however much Glenn Beck might hyperventilate, the government does NOT want to destroy the free market. It wants to preserve it – and government does this job better than the market can on its own. That is why the best complaint about libertarians isn't that they are racist or selfish, although a good many of them are those things and their beliefs encourage both of these bad behaviors. It is that they are completely out of touch with reality.
Libertarianism is a worldview that prospers only as long as nobody actually tries it in government. But the adherents to libertarianism are too unreflective, self-absorbed, and immature to realize this. Maybe that is why so many of Ron and Rand Paul’s followers are the very right-leaning college students who don’t like it when their parents give advice or set rules.
Taken from: The lesson of Rand Paul: libertarianism is juvenile
By Gabriel Winant
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
The consequences of our thirst for oil
BP had told the US Government before they drilled the well that a spill of 165,000 barrels per day would not even reach land. They said they could handle it. The fact that the spill has reached land clearly shows that the size of the spill is probably well above 200,000 barrels per day. Yes, that's BARRELS, not gallons. There are 42 gallons per barrel, which means that over 8 million gallons of crude oil is pouring into the Gulf per day. Worse, most of it is not on the surface of the water, it is sinking to the floor – destroying the waters and seabed of the Gulf of Mexico. If that oil keeps flowing, if BP cannot stop the oil flow, it could eventually get caught in the Gulf Stream and carried to all oceans. This would destroy ocean life as we know it. The oceans are a critical factor in maintaining the proper oxygen level in the atmosphere for human life.
BP stepped over the edge
The BP platform was drilling for what they call “deep oil”. They went out beyond the shelf where the ocean is about 5,000 feet deep and then drilled another 30,000 feet into the crust of the earth. How deep is that? The US Navy Seawolf class of nuclear submarines can take no more than 2,300 feet of water before they’re crushed like a tin can. They hit a pocket of oil at such high pressure that it burst all of their safety valves (which we now know were defective) all the way up to the drilling rig and then caused the rig to explode and sink. Too deep for human intervention, the Deepwater Horizon well must be serviced by remote control robots.
The BP deep water oil well was right on the edge of what human technology can do – maybe over the edge. The deposit is so large that it is either the largest or the second largest oil deposit ever found. It is mostly natural gas. The central pressure in the deposit is 165 to 170 thousand PSI. Natural gas and oil is leaking out of the deposit as far inland as Central Alabama and way over into Florida and even over to Louisiana almost as far as Texas. This is a really massive deposit. Punching holes in the deposit is a really scary event as we are now seeing. In published reports, BP estimated a blow out could reach near 165,000 barrels per day but the current blow out has already surpassed this. It now covers a 25,000 square mile area.
In too big of a hurry
60 Minutes' Scott Pelley speaks to BP's Chief Electronics Technician Mike Williams, one of the survivors of the deadly Deepwater Horizon oil rig blast who was in a position to know what caused the disaster. Williams was in charge of the rig's computers and electrical systems. He said that the huge explosions before last month's sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig - leading to a massive oil slick threatening the Gulf of Mexico - came after BP ordered faster drilling.
When the rig was first drilling down in to the ocean floor for oil and gas, the bottom of the well split open and that well had to be abandoned. That move cost BP millions of dollars. With its drilling operations costing BP about $1 million a day and the extracting of oil behind schedule, a BP manager ordered a faster pace from the crew, meaning the drill would be going down in to the potentially explosive oil and gas faster. Then, according to Mr. Williams, four weeks before the explosion an accident on the rig damaged the most vital piece of safety equipment. It is a rubber gasket called an annular at the top of a blowout preventer that is meant to seal off the drill pipe in case of an emergency. However, when the crew did seal the pipe, a crew member accidentally applied hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, meaning chunks of rubber were discovered in the drilling fluid.
A volcano of oil erupting
Paul Noel*, an engineer with the U.S. Army, writes in Pure Energy Systems News:
“When the rig sank it flipped over and landed on top of the drill hole some 5,000 feet under the ocean. Now they have a hole in the ocean floor spewing 200,000 barrels of oil a day into the ocean. Take a moment and consider that!
“Here is what happens when oil hits the salt water. If it is poured on top of the sea, oil begins to do several things. First some of it dissolves in the salt water. This dissolving is a bit limited but amounts to several percent per day of the spill exposure to the ocean. As the oil dissolves, light components evaporate pretty quickly. Once these are gone the remaining oil is heavy fraction crude. This begins to sink into the water very slowly, eventually falling to the ocean bottom over about 6 weeks. Typically this floats into an area where the shoreline is and embeds about 18 inches deep in the sand. This buried oil is not harmless. Just because the beach might appear on the surface to be clear, the sub-surface oil continues its toxic work. It floats below the surface precisely where the little sea creatures live and goes on killing them for about 10 years.
“The reason a slick would carry farther than predicted is that the salt water is saturated with oil and the air around it is saturated, so the slick cannot dissipate. …In fact the chemicals added at the well head to disburse the oil, speed this process up. This oil is mixed into the water for the top 250 feet or so. Salinity and temperature issues probably keep this oil from ever reaching the very top of the water. The exact behavior here will not be known until studies are published some years from now. This is the first time humans have encountered a deep ocean leak of this magnitude. We're in uncharted territory here. Volume per volume, it is highly probable that due to this fractioning, this oil blowing into the ocean from a mile down is causing far more ecological trouble than a surface spill of similar size.”
It only takes one quart of motor oil to make 250,000 gallons of ocean water toxic to wildlife. If we cannot cap the hole, that oil is going to destroy much more than the Gulf of Mexico – with the Atlantic Ocean being the second body of water to be affected.
Are you starting to understand the magnitude of this problem?
Ocean scientists in the Gulf of Mexico have found giant plumes of oil coagulating at up to 4300 feet below the surface, raising fears that the BP oil spill may be larger than had been thought and that it might create huge "dead zones" in the Gulf. Experts from the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology have been traversing the area around the scene of the Deepwater Horizon, the oil rig that exploded and sank on 20 April. Using the latest sampling techniques, they have identified plumes of an oil/dispersant/plankton mixture about 1 mile below the surface (a gooey mess) miles away from the Deepwater Horizon well that continues to spew oil into the water at a rate of around 200,000 barrels a day. The largest plume found so far was 300 feet deep, three miles wide, and 10 miles long.
BP succeeded on Sunday in its second attempt at inserting a new tube (basically a “straw”) into its damaged oil pipe that has been gushing oil from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico for three and a half weeks, according to BP and federal officials. The four-inch wide pipe was inserted into the leaking riser, from which the majority of the flow of oil is coming. Some of the leaking oil from the damaged well is being siphoned into barges and tankers floating on the surface of the sea. But nothing real has been done about the well itself. The oil pouring out of the opening in the crust of the earth remains completely out of control. It is like a volcano with a grave danger of a more massive eruption. Until the well is completely shut down and pressure fully relieved, the danger remains high.
There is another danger that has not been reported by BP, the government, or the news media. The removal of 2 cubic miles of oil from this huge deposit could be setting us up for a sea floor collapse – which in turn could cause earthquakes, tsunamis, and worse. The risk grows each passing day. One can only pray for the success of the teams dealing with the oil well catastrophe. Failure for BP is failure for our planet.
They better fix it fast because hurricane season is coming…. This could become a catastrophe of Biblical proportions, unless God steps in and fixes it. I don’t think He will. I think we will have to suffer the consequences of our actions – come what may.
If these consequences do not disturb you, then think about this: We are funding terrorism with every gallon of oil we buy from the Middle East. Yes, we need their oil to run our cars, to warm our homes, to make cosmetics, plastics, and medicines. But if we could run our cars and warm our homes on natural gas, then we could use our own oil for the cosmetics, plastics, and medicines. The problem is Big Oil has Congress and the government regulators in its pockets.
*Paul Noel, 52, works is an engineer for the US Army at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. He has a vast experience base including education across a wide area of technical skills and sciences. He supplies technical expertise in all areas required for new products development associated with the US Army. He supplies the army with extensive expertise in the oil and gas industry.
BP stepped over the edge
The BP platform was drilling for what they call “deep oil”. They went out beyond the shelf where the ocean is about 5,000 feet deep and then drilled another 30,000 feet into the crust of the earth. How deep is that? The US Navy Seawolf class of nuclear submarines can take no more than 2,300 feet of water before they’re crushed like a tin can. They hit a pocket of oil at such high pressure that it burst all of their safety valves (which we now know were defective) all the way up to the drilling rig and then caused the rig to explode and sink. Too deep for human intervention, the Deepwater Horizon well must be serviced by remote control robots.
The BP deep water oil well was right on the edge of what human technology can do – maybe over the edge. The deposit is so large that it is either the largest or the second largest oil deposit ever found. It is mostly natural gas. The central pressure in the deposit is 165 to 170 thousand PSI. Natural gas and oil is leaking out of the deposit as far inland as Central Alabama and way over into Florida and even over to Louisiana almost as far as Texas. This is a really massive deposit. Punching holes in the deposit is a really scary event as we are now seeing. In published reports, BP estimated a blow out could reach near 165,000 barrels per day but the current blow out has already surpassed this. It now covers a 25,000 square mile area.
In too big of a hurry
60 Minutes' Scott Pelley speaks to BP's Chief Electronics Technician Mike Williams, one of the survivors of the deadly Deepwater Horizon oil rig blast who was in a position to know what caused the disaster. Williams was in charge of the rig's computers and electrical systems. He said that the huge explosions before last month's sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig - leading to a massive oil slick threatening the Gulf of Mexico - came after BP ordered faster drilling.
When the rig was first drilling down in to the ocean floor for oil and gas, the bottom of the well split open and that well had to be abandoned. That move cost BP millions of dollars. With its drilling operations costing BP about $1 million a day and the extracting of oil behind schedule, a BP manager ordered a faster pace from the crew, meaning the drill would be going down in to the potentially explosive oil and gas faster. Then, according to Mr. Williams, four weeks before the explosion an accident on the rig damaged the most vital piece of safety equipment. It is a rubber gasket called an annular at the top of a blowout preventer that is meant to seal off the drill pipe in case of an emergency. However, when the crew did seal the pipe, a crew member accidentally applied hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, meaning chunks of rubber were discovered in the drilling fluid.
A volcano of oil erupting
Paul Noel*, an engineer with the U.S. Army, writes in Pure Energy Systems News:
“When the rig sank it flipped over and landed on top of the drill hole some 5,000 feet under the ocean. Now they have a hole in the ocean floor spewing 200,000 barrels of oil a day into the ocean. Take a moment and consider that!
“Here is what happens when oil hits the salt water. If it is poured on top of the sea, oil begins to do several things. First some of it dissolves in the salt water. This dissolving is a bit limited but amounts to several percent per day of the spill exposure to the ocean. As the oil dissolves, light components evaporate pretty quickly. Once these are gone the remaining oil is heavy fraction crude. This begins to sink into the water very slowly, eventually falling to the ocean bottom over about 6 weeks. Typically this floats into an area where the shoreline is and embeds about 18 inches deep in the sand. This buried oil is not harmless. Just because the beach might appear on the surface to be clear, the sub-surface oil continues its toxic work. It floats below the surface precisely where the little sea creatures live and goes on killing them for about 10 years.
“The reason a slick would carry farther than predicted is that the salt water is saturated with oil and the air around it is saturated, so the slick cannot dissipate. …In fact the chemicals added at the well head to disburse the oil, speed this process up. This oil is mixed into the water for the top 250 feet or so. Salinity and temperature issues probably keep this oil from ever reaching the very top of the water. The exact behavior here will not be known until studies are published some years from now. This is the first time humans have encountered a deep ocean leak of this magnitude. We're in uncharted territory here. Volume per volume, it is highly probable that due to this fractioning, this oil blowing into the ocean from a mile down is causing far more ecological trouble than a surface spill of similar size.”
It only takes one quart of motor oil to make 250,000 gallons of ocean water toxic to wildlife. If we cannot cap the hole, that oil is going to destroy much more than the Gulf of Mexico – with the Atlantic Ocean being the second body of water to be affected.
Are you starting to understand the magnitude of this problem?
Ocean scientists in the Gulf of Mexico have found giant plumes of oil coagulating at up to 4300 feet below the surface, raising fears that the BP oil spill may be larger than had been thought and that it might create huge "dead zones" in the Gulf. Experts from the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology have been traversing the area around the scene of the Deepwater Horizon, the oil rig that exploded and sank on 20 April. Using the latest sampling techniques, they have identified plumes of an oil/dispersant/plankton mixture about 1 mile below the surface (a gooey mess) miles away from the Deepwater Horizon well that continues to spew oil into the water at a rate of around 200,000 barrels a day. The largest plume found so far was 300 feet deep, three miles wide, and 10 miles long.
BP succeeded on Sunday in its second attempt at inserting a new tube (basically a “straw”) into its damaged oil pipe that has been gushing oil from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico for three and a half weeks, according to BP and federal officials. The four-inch wide pipe was inserted into the leaking riser, from which the majority of the flow of oil is coming. Some of the leaking oil from the damaged well is being siphoned into barges and tankers floating on the surface of the sea. But nothing real has been done about the well itself. The oil pouring out of the opening in the crust of the earth remains completely out of control. It is like a volcano with a grave danger of a more massive eruption. Until the well is completely shut down and pressure fully relieved, the danger remains high.
There is another danger that has not been reported by BP, the government, or the news media. The removal of 2 cubic miles of oil from this huge deposit could be setting us up for a sea floor collapse – which in turn could cause earthquakes, tsunamis, and worse. The risk grows each passing day. One can only pray for the success of the teams dealing with the oil well catastrophe. Failure for BP is failure for our planet.
They better fix it fast because hurricane season is coming…. This could become a catastrophe of Biblical proportions, unless God steps in and fixes it. I don’t think He will. I think we will have to suffer the consequences of our actions – come what may.
If these consequences do not disturb you, then think about this: We are funding terrorism with every gallon of oil we buy from the Middle East. Yes, we need their oil to run our cars, to warm our homes, to make cosmetics, plastics, and medicines. But if we could run our cars and warm our homes on natural gas, then we could use our own oil for the cosmetics, plastics, and medicines. The problem is Big Oil has Congress and the government regulators in its pockets.
*Paul Noel, 52, works is an engineer for the US Army at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. He has a vast experience base including education across a wide area of technical skills and sciences. He supplies technical expertise in all areas required for new products development associated with the US Army. He supplies the army with extensive expertise in the oil and gas industry.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
There is a better way
We all know that the illegal immigrants come to the United States because there are many business owners willing to hire them (for much less than minimum wage). We all know these farmers, poultry businesses, and building contractors hire illegal immigrants in order to get around paying an American worker minimum wage. These business owners deserve jail time for undermining our economy by not hiring Americans. If the illegal immigrants cannot get work in this country, many would go back home on their own volition.
Arizona’s new immigration law requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and if they have “reasonable suspicion” that the person “is unlawfully present in the United States.” The phrase “lawful contact” seems to authorize the police to act only if they observe an undocumented-looking person actually committing a crime. But, no, this is not the case. Another section says, “A person is guilty of trespassing” by being “present on any public or private land in this state” while lacking authorization to be in the United States. So, if a person looks Hispanic, they had better have papers on them to prove citizenship. The intent, according to the State Legislature, is “attrition through enforcement.”
Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a legislator from Tucson, has already called on the nation to protest the law by withholding its convention business. Such boycotts can be effective, as demonstrated in the late 1980s when the loss not only of convention business but of the Super Bowl prompted Arizona voters to change their mind and reinstate a Martin Luther King holiday in the state. This could happen again as the businesses of the state begin to lose money. The state’s population is already under water with their home mortgages. They can ill afford for the people of the United States to boycott their businesses.
Arizona is now being depicted as the official state of "racial profiling," with anti-Hispanic and anti-immigration labels swirling around it. But, to me, the passage of its bill to prevent the continued influx and presence of illegal immigrants in the State appears more like an act of desperation than racially motivated legislation. They are just tackling the problem from the wrong angle.
Supreme Court precedents make clear that immigration is a federal matter and that the Constitution does not authorize the states to conduct their own foreign policies. For example, in 1975, Texas passed a law to deprive undocumented immigrant children of a free public education. Many thousands of children – many of whom were on the road to eventual citizenship under immigration laws that were notably less harsh back then – faced being thrown out of school and deprived of a future. The law was challenged in federal court, with the Carter administration supporting the plaintiffs. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, Ronald Reagan was president, and there was a major push within his administration to change sides. Rex E. Lee, the solicitor general, refused to do so. By a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote for the majority that the constitutional guarantee of equal protection prohibited the state from imposing “a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status.” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee and the swing justice of his day, provided the fifth vote. He wrote that the law “threatens the creation of an underclass of future citizens and residents.”
Another example: Not too long ago the city of Hazleton, PA, passed a law that made it a crime for a landlord to rent an apartment to an undocumented immigrant. A federal judge struck down the law on the ground that immigration is the business of the federal government.
During a news conference, Attorney General Eric Holder gave the strongest indication yet that the administration will try to block Arizona's immigration law from taking effect. Holder said "the law is an unfortunate one that will be subject to potential abuse" and that the Justice Department is "considering a court challenge." Federal preemption would appear to be the most promising route for attacking the Arizona law. But I do not have confidence that the current Supreme Court will follow the constitution because the right-leaning majority often translates the constitution in support of businesses and state governments – against the rights of individuals.
Some Republicans are coming out against the law, too. Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) said he thinks Arizona's new immigration law is unconstitutional and that "it doesn't represent the best way forward" when it comes to addressing illegal immigration.
Wasn’t the system of checking a person’s papers to see if they are ‘legal’ one of the features of life in communist Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa?
There is a better way to handle the issue of illegal immigrants than to spend millions of dollars searching for them ‘by checking papers’: set up a nation-wide computerized system for documented immigrants and require business owners to check an immigrant’s legal status before hiring. It is time to upgrade out antiquated immigration service – bring it into the 21st century with a computerized database. If the worker is not in the federal immigrant database, they do not get hired. And we should issue temporary work visas for migrant farmhands to pick crops – then they go back home. If the business owner or homeowner (who hires maids, gardeners, etc) knew they could pay steep fines and do jail time for hiring illegal immigrants, I bet they would be very reluctant to do so. In fact, I bet you would see currently unemployed American citizens get some of those jobs. We all know some unemployed Americans who would be happy to mow some yards, trim some landscaping, or clean someone's house to put food on the table.
Yes, there is a better way to solve the illegal immigrant problem. Enforce the law and put the employers in jail.
Arizona’s new immigration law requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and if they have “reasonable suspicion” that the person “is unlawfully present in the United States.” The phrase “lawful contact” seems to authorize the police to act only if they observe an undocumented-looking person actually committing a crime. But, no, this is not the case. Another section says, “A person is guilty of trespassing” by being “present on any public or private land in this state” while lacking authorization to be in the United States. So, if a person looks Hispanic, they had better have papers on them to prove citizenship. The intent, according to the State Legislature, is “attrition through enforcement.”
Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a legislator from Tucson, has already called on the nation to protest the law by withholding its convention business. Such boycotts can be effective, as demonstrated in the late 1980s when the loss not only of convention business but of the Super Bowl prompted Arizona voters to change their mind and reinstate a Martin Luther King holiday in the state. This could happen again as the businesses of the state begin to lose money. The state’s population is already under water with their home mortgages. They can ill afford for the people of the United States to boycott their businesses.
Arizona is now being depicted as the official state of "racial profiling," with anti-Hispanic and anti-immigration labels swirling around it. But, to me, the passage of its bill to prevent the continued influx and presence of illegal immigrants in the State appears more like an act of desperation than racially motivated legislation. They are just tackling the problem from the wrong angle.
Supreme Court precedents make clear that immigration is a federal matter and that the Constitution does not authorize the states to conduct their own foreign policies. For example, in 1975, Texas passed a law to deprive undocumented immigrant children of a free public education. Many thousands of children – many of whom were on the road to eventual citizenship under immigration laws that were notably less harsh back then – faced being thrown out of school and deprived of a future. The law was challenged in federal court, with the Carter administration supporting the plaintiffs. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, Ronald Reagan was president, and there was a major push within his administration to change sides. Rex E. Lee, the solicitor general, refused to do so. By a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote for the majority that the constitutional guarantee of equal protection prohibited the state from imposing “a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status.” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee and the swing justice of his day, provided the fifth vote. He wrote that the law “threatens the creation of an underclass of future citizens and residents.”
Another example: Not too long ago the city of Hazleton, PA, passed a law that made it a crime for a landlord to rent an apartment to an undocumented immigrant. A federal judge struck down the law on the ground that immigration is the business of the federal government.
During a news conference, Attorney General Eric Holder gave the strongest indication yet that the administration will try to block Arizona's immigration law from taking effect. Holder said "the law is an unfortunate one that will be subject to potential abuse" and that the Justice Department is "considering a court challenge." Federal preemption would appear to be the most promising route for attacking the Arizona law. But I do not have confidence that the current Supreme Court will follow the constitution because the right-leaning majority often translates the constitution in support of businesses and state governments – against the rights of individuals.
Some Republicans are coming out against the law, too. Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) said he thinks Arizona's new immigration law is unconstitutional and that "it doesn't represent the best way forward" when it comes to addressing illegal immigration.
Wasn’t the system of checking a person’s papers to see if they are ‘legal’ one of the features of life in communist Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa?
There is a better way to handle the issue of illegal immigrants than to spend millions of dollars searching for them ‘by checking papers’: set up a nation-wide computerized system for documented immigrants and require business owners to check an immigrant’s legal status before hiring. It is time to upgrade out antiquated immigration service – bring it into the 21st century with a computerized database. If the worker is not in the federal immigrant database, they do not get hired. And we should issue temporary work visas for migrant farmhands to pick crops – then they go back home. If the business owner or homeowner (who hires maids, gardeners, etc) knew they could pay steep fines and do jail time for hiring illegal immigrants, I bet they would be very reluctant to do so. In fact, I bet you would see currently unemployed American citizens get some of those jobs. We all know some unemployed Americans who would be happy to mow some yards, trim some landscaping, or clean someone's house to put food on the table.
Yes, there is a better way to solve the illegal immigrant problem. Enforce the law and put the employers in jail.
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