OPINION:
The national Democratic Party is drifting into a dangerous zone of politics in America.
It is edging into a grim territory associated with antagonism toward at least two of the basics that made the United States experiment in self-governance unique in the world back in March 1789. And that made it unquestionably the leading nation on this planet for the last 100 years.
The first danger is the hostility that Democrats as a party are showing toward the sovereignty of the republic.
The idea that America is for Americans, not for foreigners, is alien to today’s Democratic leaders in Washington — and astonishingly alien to the rank-and-file lawmakers who belong to that party.
Once upon a time, Democrats were one with Republicans in warmly welcoming foreigners who came as legal visitors, eager workers, outstanding contributors to the collective intellectual wealth of the republic and to its financial health and, if said foreigners they so aspired, as naturalized citizens.
That was possible, even natural, because Democrats, once the party of slavery, evolved proudly into the upholders of individuals’ rights and the equality of opportunity for all.
From the Great Decentralizer Thomas Jefferson to the Evil-Empire Slayer Ronald Reagan and the Good Walls Make Good Neighbors Evangelist Donald Trump, Republicans also shared with Democrats this self-evident truth:
Sovereignty was and is the first basic of any nation anywhere on the planet.
Or at least sovereignty was the first basic until House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her party declared it immoral to build a wall to keep foreigners from gaining shadowy entry into the workforce — and for a few into the criminal crews — of United States
Even the utterance of the word “foreigner” now undergoes an insidious twisting at the hands of Pelosi Democrats who to try to make it mean hatred of anyone not having U.S. citizenship.
The Pelosi Democrats and their admirers in what at least once resembled a just-the-facts-ma’am American press are mangling daily the simple use of the word “foreigner” into an expression of a raw, irrational xenophobia of the worst kind.
“Of the Worst kind” in Pelosi-speak means of the Donald J. Trump-Republican party kind.
The second antagonism of the Pelosi Democrats is to that basic of Americanism absent that neither it or any other nation can take even modest pride in its existence.
That is the basic adherence to the rule of law.
The rule of law demands recognition of legal citizenship as the guarantor of all the rights normally associated with being an American by birth or by legal application. The latter means the heart-pounding satisfaction of acing the citizenship test and with it the right to swearing allegiance to the United States.
Ignoring illegality can be a humanly practical act required at times when enforcement is utterly impractical and when virtually every American citizen views it as unacceptably inhumane to expel millions of people who think, talk, act and believe like Americans.
That is why Republicans and Democrats were brothers in arms when it came to nixing any idea of rounding up millions of foreigners who at some time in the past had slipped past immigration authorities but lived their lives as Americans in every way but documented entry.
That’s a world apart from the position the Pelosi Democrats have staked out. As just one example, they demanded that the U.S. government reduce the number of beds on which migrants and asylum seekers may rest their heads while the government’s deciders hear and adjudicate their cases.
When a would-be migrant seeking legal entry has no federal bed for his head, he must by law be freed to resume his life as an illegal migrant until further notice — or as an asylum seeker to sample the joys and hardships of U.S. life until further notice.
If our inundated immigration authorities get around to giving further notice, and the recipient takes no notice, that’s another notch in Pelosi Democrats’ aspirations belt. The Democrats’ goals is a permanent Democratic majority.
Thus Mrs. Pelosi’s Democrats intend to make that possible through the gratitude of millions more of undocumented migrants who they are bent on turning into legal voters in all U.S. elections — not by granting a path to citizenship but by rewriting the laws.
The president did get to scoop up some crumbs from the Pelosi Democrats in the form of $1.4 billion in vertical border barrier building instead of the $5.7 billion he had requested. Not sure where the art of that deal was.
Democrats muscled the Senate Republican majority — its knees atremble with a petrifying fear of getting blamed for another partial government shutdown — into accepting the Pelosi Democratic Party’s demand that the number of beds would be slashed to 40,520 from the 49,000 now cradling the heads of detainees every day. President Trump had wanted more money for more beds. He lost on that one, too.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up the Pelosi Democrats tramp-tramp-tramp toward a new and dangerous zone for them in American politics by saying, “Imagine the absurdity of this: House Democrats want to set a limit on how many criminal aliens our government can detain.”
Things are not going well for the Democratic Party of yore, which once put America’s interests first, and which presumably is still the goal of the Republican Party and most certainly of its leader, Mr. Trump.
Suppose as time marches on, the nation votes for the Pelosi Democrats’ occupation of an anti-American zone in this republic’s politics, for abandoning the preeminence of American sovereignty, of American citizenship and of the rule of law in America.
Then what?
Try this analogy. Besides Pelosi Democrats, there’s something else infuriatingly contradictory in the universe and hard to wrap our little brains around. It’s called “antimatter.”
Antimatter has the opposite properties of subatomic particles like the ones you’ve heard of before — itsy bitsy pieces of matter called protons, neutrons and electrons.
Evidence suggests antimatter exists extremely sparsely — some evidence suggests maybe not so sparsely — in the universe.
Scientists are able to produce it on earth but in ridiculously infinitesimal quantities for mind-numbingly expensive trillion-dollar outlays.
And it’s nasty stuff.
It’s unstable.
Bring it into the same zone in direct contact with regular matter and you get a blowup that makes a hydrogen bomb blast look like a firecracker.
Being in the zone isn’t always good, as the Pelosi Democrats might want to acknowledge. It can be highly dangerous.
It depends on the zone.
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