By Joe Guzzardi
06/20/2008
Dianne Feinstein is a power-mad, crazy old coot afflicted with a God complex that makes her continued presence in the U.S. Senate a threat — not only to immigration reform patriots but also to all Americans.
If that sounds exaggerated, spend five minutes reading my column and I'll prove it to you.
Feinstein was infamously back in the California news last week when she intervened to prevent 17-year-old Fresno high school valedictorian Arthur Mkoyan’s deportation. The student and his family — whose tourist visas expired thirteen years ago — had been ordered deported before Feinstein interceded by introducing a private Senate bill to delay the process.
Feinstein was infamously back in the California news last week when she intervened to prevent 17-year-old Fresno high school valedictorian Arthur Mkoyan’s deportation. The student and his family — whose tourist visas expired thirteen years ago — had been ordered deported before Feinstein interceded by introducing a private Senate bill to delay the process.
Feinstein explained herself in her usual, idiotic way — Mkoyan is a fine young man from an excellent family, just the kind we need more of in the U.S., to send him back to Armenia where he knows no one would be cruel, blah, blah, blah…[Senator Tries to Keep Valedictorian from Deportation, By Chuck Afflerbach, CNN, June 10, 2008]
Two big problems:
Feinstein’s action then is a meaningless gesture — an insulting slap in the face to the normal, legally-established ICE procedures to deport immigration law violators. Mkoyan’s case has been in litigation for more than ten years. Every decision has come down against Mkoyan, including one by the usually sympathetic-to-illegals Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In 2006, Feinstein introduced three such bills on behalf of fourteen people: the families Arreola, Placencia and Yamada.
Here are a few of the phrases Feinstein used to plead their cases: “bright and engaging,” “alcoholic father,” “physically abusive,” “ taking nursing classes,” “honor student,” “ mother was killed in a car crash…orphaned,” “popular and trustworthy,” “junior varsity baseball…varsity football…girl’s softball…” “enormous hardship” and of course, “out of the shadows”.
And, curiously, for the handful of Senators listening but not already persuaded, Feinstein threw in this one to seal her case: “They own their own car.”
Feinstein, therefore, creates her own version of immigration law that indefinitely delays deportation for anyone she, and she alone, deems worthy — thus, “The Law According To Dianne Feinstein.”
Sadly for those of us who think that immigration laws should be enforced, Feinstein can introduce private bills until the cows come home.
And the possibilities are truly limitless.
As a veteran teacher in one of California’s largest school districts, I can say without fear of contradiction that any Open Borders advocate could pick out dozens of students illegally in the U.S. from among California’s 6 million K-12 enrollment, highlight their outstanding qualities (while ignoring their less attractive ones) and do the Feinstein song and dance.
In addition to her crusade this week on behalf of visa violators, Feinstein stubbornly stuck to her (empty) guns about California’s need — from her narrow viewpoint — for more agricultural workers.
Less than a month ago, Feinstein had her ears pinned back on the Senate floor, when Majority Leader Harry Reid stripped out of a supplemental spending bill her language that would have amnestied millions of farm workers and created thousands more visas.
After suffering such a public humiliation among her peers, Feinstein — if she had her wits about her — would conclude that the Ag Workers issue is dead and that she should lay low, at least for the time being.
Unsurprisingly, Feinstein took a different course.
When many readers, irate over Feinstein’s ag worker duplicity, e-mailed her they received in reply a long list of unsubstantiated statistics about California’s alleged farm crisis.
Feinstein’s mail included this sentence, without quoting a source: “Between 2006 and 2007, 13,280 farms shut down in the United States, 1,000 of which were in California.”
If 1,000 California farms shut down, you can’t prove it by me, a native Californian. Every week, I attend at least one of five local farmer’s markets — in Lodi, Davis, Sacramento and two in Stockton. They’re booming. Patrons have to stand in line to pay the vendors.
Furthermore, in the twenty years I’ve lived in Lodi, the number of wineries has increased three-fold. For the uninitiated, and perhaps Feinstein is one, grapes have to be grown and picked before a winery is established.
Attached to Feinstein’s response is this crazy 2006 picture of Toni Scully, a Lake County, CA pear grower, which, according to Feinstein, “proves” that fruit is “rotting” and that the guest worker need is “urgent”.
The photograph originally appeared in The New York Times. [Pickers Are Few, and Growers Blame Congress, By Julia Preston September 22, 2006]
What I see, however, is a staged photograph with ripe pears, obviously hauled in from the orchard (since no trees are in sight) for the photo-op. (Read Steve Sailer’s pear “crisis” expose here.)
Here’s what I know about pears: when I need them, whether they are in season or not, I can buy all I want of several varieties at the local supermarket for about $1.00 a pound. What more is there to say?
Omitted from Feinstein’s deceitful 2008 mail, two years after the picture was taken, is the important fact that last year (2007), in response to a possible worker shortage California State Senator Pat Wiggins introduced SB 319 that increased the maximum number of hours California minors can work during the peak harvest.
Wiggins’ bill, which Schwarzenegger signed last October, allows teenagers to work up to 10 hours a day and forty-eight hours weekly during the summer months.
SB 319 is the correct way to approach potential labor shortages: look for solutions in our own backyard before issuing hundreds of thousands of visas for foreign-born workers.
My explanation of Feinstein’s bizarre behavior: she’s crazy — senile.
I first advanced my theory of creeping senility in the U.S. Senate a few months ago when I suggested that Teddy Kennedy might be afflicted. That was well before his recent brain cancer surgery and also before New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici announced his retirement because of dementia.
Reader Molly Powell took me to task for my comments about Kennedy. She reminded me that Kennedy has been sticking it to America on immigration for more than four decades.
But that’s not Feinstein’s case.
Not that long ago, immigration reform analysts considered Feinstein a moderate. In fact Better Immigration.Com, a website that grades Congress on its immigration voting patterns, rates Feinstein a “C” over her career but a “D-“ from 2005-2008.
And Feinstein got “F” and “F-“ on ending chain migration, unnecessary visas while endorsing amnesty and promoting more foreign workers.
Some observers say that Feinstein’s immigration cave-in is a logical extension of California’s increasingly volatile political environment.
But why should Feinstein be swayed by outside forces, whoever they may be? Feinstein’s not up for re-election until 2012. Maybe she won’t run.
Whether Feinstein runs or not and whether she wins or not, so what? She’s a multimillionaire married to a billionaire.
On June 22, Feinstein turns 75. According to a study by Richard Posner, more than 16 percent of Americans her age show signs of senile dementia.
I say Feinstein is one of them.
She nuts…and that explains better than anything else Feinstein’s continuingly irrational immigration positions.
Joe Guzzardi is the Editor of VDARE.COM Letters to the Editor. In addition, he is an English teacher at the Lodi Adult School and has been writing a weekly newspaper column since 1988. This column is exclusive to VDARE.COM
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
