Sanctuary Cities: A Grave Problem for Democrats

Democrats have a conflict in their values and they need to decide what they stand for.

Yesterday this blog asked: What are the actual values of Democrats?  

Equal opportunity for all. I posit that one of the core values is that our society should enable opportunity for all, a pathway so that every citizen can achieve to the limits of their abilities and character.    This value has a corollary:

     Racial, religious, ethnic, and gender discrimination is wrong.  It offended that value when the segregated white south, through law and custom, kept blacks in a subservient role, and Democrats remember that tradition and remain on the lookout for white majority prejudice.  As the commitment to civil rights developed over the past 50 years Democrats became the party of anti-prejudice.

Equal justice for all.  I posit that a second core value is equality of justice, so that the laws apply equally to all people, whether rich or poor, whatever the social standing, whatever the race or ethnicity.   Democrats are suspicious that the rich and powerful might get away with things that the poor are punished for.  The failure of the Obama administration to prosecute bankers involved in the financial crisis was a breach of that value and a grave political mistake and raised the issue of Democrats having been corrupted by their association with Wall Street and special interests.  Democrats are suspicious of playing favorites, especially of the powerful being favored over the less powerful.

Sanctuary cities put those two values into conflict.

On the one hand Democrats value equal opportunity for the disadvantaged to get ahead and are suspicious of racial and ethnic discrimination, but they also have a value of equal justice.   The sanctuary city movement did not balance those two values.  It chose between them by protecting lawbreakers, if those lawbreakers are of a certain type: immigrants here illegally.   

This choice is a new evolution for progressives, a position very different from the one held by President Bill Clinton.  The new position has significant political consequences, which worked out badly for Democrats.   First is that they did not win the support they expected from Hispanics, with a third of them voting for Trump.  Second is that native born whites noticed that Democrats were saying that brown immigrants did not have to obey the law but white people did, and they drew the undeniable inference that Democrats were employing legal prejudice in favor of others, thus bolstering white resentment.  Third is that Democrats chose a team to protect (foreign lawbreakers) against the team representing order (police and law enforcement) which offended people of authoritarian mindset, a bipartisan group.  Fourth is that Democrats lost the moral high ground and ability to criticize Trump and Republican breaches of the law because Democrats openly endorsed being scofflaws.

Equal justice under law

My recommendation will make Democrats uncomfortable because, in fact, there is a conflict of values, but my recommendation is to choose equal justice over equal opportunity and to end the defense of sanctuary cities.  In the meantime, work legislatively to come up with a new comprehensive immigration rule.  Enforcement of the current law will have catastrophic effects on some blended immigrant families and the cruelty of their situation will be influential in creating some compassion in whatever new law is created.  That cruelty will cause Democrats to be reluctant to make the change, but in the longer term the consequence of Democrats abandoning a commitment to equal justice will have equal or greater consequences and cruelty.  If the Democrats abandon a commitment to equal justice under law the whole tapestry of laws that protect the public will be weakened.  The Democratic notion that powerful interests will use their power to take advantage of the vulnerable is still present and real, and therefore the laws are a great defense against that pressure.  Democrats should not abandon that line of defense.

Whistleblower attorney Thad Guyer addresses this issue with a strong denunciation of Democrats' political and moral failure, saying that the Democratic emphasis on being anti-Trump rather than pro-justice is political and moral malpractice.

Guest Comment: 

Thad Guyer

  

“Our Values? Democrats Perceived as Standing for Nothing Other than Trump Hate—because of Russiagate"

So says a new ABC/Washington Post poll out Sunday. The poll finds "only 37 percent of Americans say the Democratic Party “stands for something,” while 52 percent say it just stands against Trump. The perceived lack of an affirmative agenda weakens the Democrats’ efforts to capitalize on Trump’s failings." (ABC News (Jul 16, 2017 https://goo.gl/v9vcCQ). The news from an electoral perspective is far worse. 27 percent of Democrats say their own party “just stands against Trump”. And “58 percent of whites see the Democrats as simply anti-Trump”, with that same percentage of men overall saying it. But it’s worse still: “55 percent of independents” dismiss the Democratic Party as being little more than an anti-Trump therapy group. Even “31 percent of blacks, long among the most loyal Democratic groups” see Democrats as a clan of anti-Trumpers.

Trust in the media of course gets lower with each new anti-Trump headline. Indeed, the Washington Post declined to print the results of its own joint poll (https://goo.gl/bxwP96), a flagrant journalistic breach ever more common with the Post, NYT and CNN. Indeed, the Post hid arguably the most significant finding of the survey (only ABC published it): “The number of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who think that the Russians sought to influence the election, and that the Trump team intentionally helped them, has fallen from 18 percent in April to 9 percent now”, that is, the ever more hyped Russiagate media narrative has resulted in a 50% drop among GOP and GOP-friendly independents who believe the whole mess amounts to anything other than an advertising sales scheme. Despite the daily barrage of Russiagate conspiracy “revelations”, 36% to 40% of Democrats (and left independents) aren’t buying it, and the poll says the effort to get more of this group onboard the Trump Hate Express has stalled.

Despite its journalistic breaches, the Post did give this warning: “Whatever Trump’s struggles, the poll shows clear risks of Democrats’ opposition to Trump” and being regarded as just a bunch of anti-Trump zealots crying in their beer because they thought throwing open the borders and giving criminals refuge in “sanctuary cities” would galvanize a historic Hispanic turnout to beat back white “deplorables” worried about losing their jobs and national identity. Even now, our feckless party leadership in the Senate is vowing to block any vote on Kate’s Law, which a clear majority of Americans support (including two dozen Democrats who voted for it in the House). As the voters who put Trump in office see it, the law would “justly criminalize deported criminals sneaking back across the border into sanctuary cities to commit still more crimes, adding to those for which they were already deported”. To be sure, this is not what Chuck Schumer sees as a winning issue for Democrats in 2020, but for the 2018 midterms he fears the bloodbath in the Senate will be far worse if our “identity” voters stay home. He’s hoping to prevent the Republicans from getting to 60 filibuster-proof senators, when they are projected to get up to only 55-58 seats. By contrast, Nancy Pelosi gave the green light for 24 House Democrats from California to Massachusetts to join Republicans in supporting Kate’s Law. But she wasn’t willing to risk giving her Democrats freedom to also vote against sanctuary cities, making it clear that crossing party lines on that would be punished.

I hate to say it, but the ABC/WaPo poll bears out this headline from GOP.com: “Out Of Touch Democrats Show Why They’re Out Of Office” (Jul 12, 2017, https://goo.gl/wzQ142).