OPINION:
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions struck a hard tone in his sanctuary city speech from Miami, publicly lashing out at Chicago as a “sad example” of a community that’s lost its law and order compass.
Go, Jeff Sessions. This is music to patriotic ears.
For far too long, America’s law-abiding citizens have suffered under a federal yolk that demanded, most illogically, that illegals be given a chance to stay and mingle, rather than face the deportations they deserved.
Illegals who broke laws above and beyond the ones they already broke by illegally crossing the border were, and are, of particular consternation. As the thinking goes: If they weren’t here illegally in the first place, this [insert crime here] never would have occurred.
Just ask Kate Steinle’s dad. He’s the one who stood and watched as an illegal with a felony background and previous deportations pulled out a gun and shot and killed his daughter as they walked along a pier in sanctuary city San Francisco.
Well, Sanctuary City, meet Crackdown.
Sessions turned his ire on Chicago and other cities that roll out the welcome for illegals, and refuse to cooperate with federal detention orders, as little more than a “trafficker, smuggler or predator’s best friend.”
Ouch. Truth hurts — yes?
“Respect for the rule of law has broken down,” Sessions went on, from the city that’s just did a 180 on its own sanctuary policies, Miami. “In Chicago, their so-called ’sanctuary’ policies are just one sad example. Chicago’s leaders have made this a political issue and direct their police to refuse [federal requests].”
What’s especially curious about Chicago is that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made a major case for more gun control at the federal level by saying that firearms could trickle into his city — that his own city’s crackdowns, to be truly effective, have to be expanded to states nearby Illinois, and so on and so forth, throughout the country.
But he doesn’t make that same case for illegals. He doesn’t see how illegals welcomed to Chicago may in fact wander into other states, into other regions of the country, and in so doing, pose a national threat.
Rather, Emanuel has only dug in deeper in defense of illegals.
“In a week in which the Trump administration is being forced to answer questions about neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the KKK, they could not have picked a worse time to resume their attack on the immigrants who see America as a beacon of hope,” Emanuel said, NBC News reported.
Well, let the standoff begin.
When Barack Obama was president, the line from the White House during the state backlash against forced acceptance of refugees was that immigration was a federal issue and that states had no legal right to take matters into their own hands.
Now that President Donald Trump and the Republicans dominate on Capitol Hill?
Well, suddenly Democrats have found the 10th Amendment.
But sorry, Dems. You can’t have it both ways — not that they won’t try. Chicago has filed a lawsuit, complaining that the federal government’s vow to strip funding from sanctuary cities is unconstitutional.
Emanuel calls it “blackmail.” Obama, when he did similarly with Common Core — when he manipulated the federal grant process so that states that bucked the Big Government education plan lost out on funding — suggested different terminology, like necessary, or “Too Bad,” or “Tough Luck.”
Sessions and this White House?
They call it protecting the good citizens of America. And for the law and order crowd, it’s the White House’s messaging, not Emanuel’s, not the left’s, that resonates.
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