A bill being proposed by California 'DREAM Act' proponent/Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) provides a perfect lesson in liberal thinking. Cedillo has proposed legislation that "would change police procedures at drunken-driving checkpoints, prohibiting officers from arresting drivers and immediately impounding their cars if their only offense is not having a license."
Those in favor of the assemblyman's bill believe AB353 will keep drivers from being trapped at DUI checkpoints. Supporters also believe that -- now, this is key -- "otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants" shouldn't be penalized for breaking the law by entering the country illegally, or by driving illegally when they get here.
Gil Cedillo is of one of California's most radical pro-illegal-immigrant state lawmakers, which is why he'll never encourage illegals, with or without licenses, to drive themselves back across the border. Leave it to a liberal to come up with a law to assist lawbreakers in their efforts to break the law.
The argument is a typical one. Mark Silverman, Director of Immigration Policy at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, contends that in California, "[y]ou have to be able to drive to survive, to get anywhere." Especially to locations where illegals do jobs that Americans, caught in the nightmare of 9.1% unemployment, supposedly won't do. Which means, out of criminal necessity, "[i]mmigrant drivers without licenses will be driving anyway."
It's the old "they'll do it anyway" argument -- the one the left uses to justify liberal policy that sane people would otherwise reject, such as handing out condoms to children and clean needles to drug addicts. These same people are now attempting to convince Americans that those here unlawfully are worthy of special assistance that includes overlooking their lawbreaking.
To be fair, the bill does say that if pulled over, police would have to make at least a "reasonable effort to find either the registered owner of the unlicensed driver's car, or a licensed driver authorized by the registered owner to pick up the car at the checkpoint."
The key phrase here is "reasonable effort," because locating someone to come and pick up a car driven by an illegal driver presumes that law-abiding citizens with registered vehicles are knowingly lending their cars to illegals without drivers' licenses. If that's so, enablers and offenders -- with or without a license -- should all be arrested.
The bill says that if "officers cannot find the registered owner or an authorized licensed driver they could impound the car." What they should do is impound both the car and the driver, but that will never happen because Assemblyman Cedillo's proposal also specifies that "[t]he unlicensed driver could be cited but not arrested."
This is a country where the left uses the excuse for overlooking lawbreaking interlopers living in our midst that it's too hard to round up 11 million people. Then, when they have an opportunity to thin the herd, instead of arresting and deporting unlicensed illegal alien drivers, liberals look for another opportunity to restructure the criminal code.
So much so that Mark Silverman laments the injustice of "current DUI checkpoint policy[, which he claims] singles out illegal immigrants for punishment." Punishment for what? Driving drunk without a license, while living illegally in the state of California?
Regardless of what the bill's supporters say, like the rest of America, Californians are the ones being penalized. American citizens are mandated to have driver's licenses, compelled to pay high taxes, forced to live under the boot of an ever-expanding federal government, and obliged to attend funerals of individuals killed by drunk-driving unlicensed illegals.
Take for example Marcos Lopez Garcia. If Garcia had been apprehended at a checkpoint before four-year-old Christopher Rowe of Santa Rosa, California was run down in a crosswalk, the little boy would be alive today. Living in the United States illegally, Marcos delivered pizza in the same town where Christopher lived. Before killing the child in a drunk-driving hit-and-run, Garcia had two prior arrests for operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol. Yet liberal politicians still choose to be advocates for illegal aliens like Lopez Garcia, a man who terrorized the streets of Santa Rosa while driving -- often drunk -- without a license.
In 2000 and then again in a 2008 follow-up study, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that "unlicensed drivers were 4.9 times more likely to be involved in a fatal crash than licensed drivers, 3.7 times more likely to drive while intoxicated, and 4.4 times more likely to be hit-and-run drivers."
The liberal reasoning that ignores statistics like these is that the data gathered by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety doesn't differentiate between illegals without drivers' licenses and legal citizens who are unlicensed. As if that makes a difference. The last time I checked, both categories were made up of people who knowingly break the law.
Once again, this issue proves that liberals' solutions to problems are usually rooted in voter-based politics. The ploy is to argue to allow illegal immigrants to drive without licenses so that, right around Election Day, it's even easier for the left to say, "Since they're driving without licenses already, why not make it legal for them to get valid licenses?"
Allowing certain people to circumvent the law is just one more example of the liberal worldview. Nonetheless, it's still vitally important to remember that the logic behind the "letting illegals drive without licenses" example is applicable to liberal philosophy in virtually all situations.
Why? Because open-minded Democrats are notorious for defending the dreadful, advocating for the absurd, and endeavoring to pass legislation that advances their power through the creation of straw men -- and they do it on purpose. The ultimate goal is to nurture a platform from which the left can argue for additional laws and policies that "fix" what's already bad by making it worse and argue that it be done in order to the rectify the illogical set of circumstances they initiated in the first place.
Jeannie DeAngelis
Jeannie DeAngelis writes almost exclusively for American Thinker and has been published on the conservative website Pajamas Media, as well as hosting a blog. See Jeannie's Blog
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