L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace!

In the movie Patton, during the Sicily campaign, General Patton calls General Lucian Truscott to his headquarters and outlines an “end run” around the German flank he wants from Truscott in the form of an amphibious assault on the northern town of Brolo, threatening the German escape route across the Strait of Messina. Truscott asks for a day to prepare, which Patton refuses to grant. Patton warns Truscott to “guard against being too conservative” and admonishes him to remember “L’audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace!” (Audacity, audacity, always audacity), which the movie Patton incorrectly attributes to Frederick the Great.

Last month, fed up with the feds, Gov. Jan Brewer took matters into her own hands and demonstrated l'audace by signing into Arizona law what is already a federal felony – to be in this country illegally – thus starting a firestorm of outrage from the liberal left.

Macbethian images of Nazism and Hitler were conjured up – one by the president of the Hispanic Federation, who is too young to know anything about life in the time of Hitler except through history books, and another, from Cardinal Roger Mahoney, who to my knowledge has never served outside of California for any period and was a 9-year old in Los Angeles when Hitler killed himself. Screeds from the media fulminated against the new police state of Arizona. Too tempting a target to resist adding a dollop of demagoguery, Obama waded in, once again as factually misinformed as in the infamous Cambridge police incident, and threatened to use the power of the DOJ to investigate civil rights violations.

A recent Rasmussen poll showed 70% of Arizonians were in favor of the law and Brewer’s popularity soared. Yet some of the carpers against the law were the same crowd that rammed through a healthcare law that was overwhelmingly opposed by the citizenry. “Misguided and irresponsible,” Pelosi said of the Arizona law.

It’s been three years since immigration reform wasn’t rammed through Congress and the southern border of the U.S. is as leaky as ever. About 11 million illegals are living in the country, about 500,000 in Arizona. Arizonians have had to spend millions in tax dollars to educate and medicate these illegals and they’re predictably torqued that Washington refuses to enforce the laws on the books and guard the borders. They’ve been screaming that their houses are broken into and, if left vacant for even a short while, occupied by illegals and drug smugglers, their property is vandalized and stolen, people have been intimidated, even threatened.

While Republicans and Democrats dithered, trying to figure out how to engineer another “reform” law – in this case one that would not recriminate either party’s efforts to pander to the Hispanic vote – rancher Rob Krentz was murdered on his own land by an illegal, presumably a drug smuggler, whose tracks led back into Mexico. A deputy sheriff was wounded in the desert near Phoenix by in a shootout with illegals after discovering a cache of marijuana. Helicopters led to the capture of 17 illegals in the area of the shootout, three of whom matched the deputy’s description. A 15-year old Maricopa County girl was raped and kidnapped by an illegal who had been in this country 10 years.

These are not the kind of illegals that mow lawns and do odd jobs that Americans won’t do. Since the southern border is so easy to penetrate, it has attracted the bad guys from Mexico and Central America. The Chiricahua Corridor in Arizona, near which Rob Krentz was murdered, is notoriously a drug smuggler’s interstate highway. Lately, they have gotten into the people smuggling business, and the price of admission to the U.S. is $2,500. If you want to enter the country and don’t have the cash, you carry the smuggler’s dope. People smugglers are called “coyotes” – not the kind that howl at the moon – the kind that would shoot, rape, or steal from his customer in a heartbeat. One research reporter dug into the police records of two coyotes and found that they had been arrested and released by the courts or law enforcement 35 times.

Normally, when a disaster occurs that affects Americans, you’d expect Obama to jump in Air Force One and head to the site for a photo-op. Not so in Arizona where this disaster doesn’t produce the visual images of swollen rivers and flattened houses. We aren’t likely to see Obama walking the coyote’s corridor or talking to people who have been victimized by the dereliction of the federal government. However, he had no trouble jumping before a TV camera to make the outrageous statement: “You can imagine, if you are a Hispanic-American in Arizona – your great-grandparents may have been there before Arizona was even a state. But now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed. That’s something that could potentially happen. That’s not the right way to go.”

Obama’s statement is such a distortion it borders on deceit. We live in a world in which identification is routinely required. Buying alcoholic beverages? Produce ID. Buying an airline ticket or boarding a flight? Produce ID. Using health insurance to pay for an appointment with your doctor? Produce ID. Checking into a hotel? Produce ID. Picking up a prescription for a controlled substance? Produce ID (and sign your name on a roster). Entering certain buildings? Produce ID. Cashing a check? Produce ID. Need I go on?

Although Obama alludes to racial profiling, the liberal media screams it. This too is bogus. There aren’t enough police in Arizona to stop and ID everyone who looks Hispanic to determine their legality. Taking your kid to get ice cream isn’t going to result in having to produce papers or ID unless you do something that involves the police. Then they have the right to find out who you are – not who you say you are – and that requires some form of government-issued identification. That’s the “papers” Obama refers to. If you have no identification, no driver’s license because you left your identity “papers” at home, you won’t be arrested even if you are a purple Martian with antenna ears. But you will be held until you can establish that you are here legally.

The Arizona law is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, the liberal elites complain. The Fourth Amendment says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …” Note the word “unreasonable.” True, there is no objective standard for what is “reasonable” and what is “unreasonable,” but the Supreme Court in 2005 upheld the ruling that police questioning does not represent a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. I have had a home in Fannin County (Blue Ridge) Georgia for eight years and have been stopped at least a dozen times at road blocks for no reason and asked to present my driver’s license and registration/insurance card. There is no Constitutional protection against this even if I argue that it “profiles” only people driving a car on a certain road.

Obama is apparently unaware that for 70 years federal law has required aliens (people who are not citizens) to have with them at all times some evidence that they are in this country legally. That can be a green card, a student visa, other kinds of visas, or a stamped foreign passport. Absent these, a person will be detained, not arrested, until proof of legal entry is established. Arizona simply confirms existing law.

Obama can beat his breast and threaten to sue Arizona, which he has said is under consideration, but his Attorney General Holder is going to be on shaky ground. In 2005, Arizona won a federal court case that challenged the constitutionality of a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote. In 2006, it won a challenge to its human smuggling law. In 2008, it won its case to make it illegal to employ an illegal (what a novel idea.)

No, the real problem here isn’t that Arizona has preempted federal immigration law. In fact it copied the federal law. The real problem is that we have a federal government that is not upholding its constitutional obligations – that pesky thing that Obama and members of Congress swore to protect and defend.

It’s no longer hip or cool to believe that the U.S. Constitution – the most magnificent document ever produced by a committee – has any relevance in modern generations. Our president doesn’t think so. Most of our judges don’t think so. Some members of our Congress don’t even know what it says. When asked the constitutional basis for the healthcare reform insurance mandate, John Conyers (D-MI) said, “the good and welfare clause and a couple of others.” Of course, there is no “good and welfare” clause in the Constitution.

Just this week I received an email from a friend in which a disclaimer inside of a book published by Wilder Publishers stated: “This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.” The book involved? The Constitution of the United States of America, with the Bill of Rights and all of the Amendments; The Declaration of Independence; and the Articles of Confederation. PC madness run amok.

Article Four, Section Four of the Constitution says: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion …” It doesn’t say a military invasion. It doesn’t say an armed invasion. It simply says “invasion” – to intrude, encroach, infringe without permission.

Writing in The National Review last month, Andrew McCarthy got it right: “In adopting the Constitution, in giving their consent to our social contract, the sovereign states agreed to cede some of their authority in exchange for one overriding benefit. It was not to have an overseer to monitor our salt intake, design our light bulbs, prepare for our retirement, manage our medical treatments, or mandate our purchases. It was to provide for our security. It was to repel invasion by aliens who challenged our sovereign authority to set the conditions of their presence on our soil.

“For that reason, border security has always been the highest prerogative of sovereignty. Immune from judicial interference, it answers to no warrant requirement. At the border, the federal government does not need probable cause – or any cause at all – to inquire into a person’s citizenship, immigration status, or purpose for attempting to enter our country. Agents can detain immigrants and citizens alike. They can perform bodily searches. They can go through every inch of a would-be entrant’s belongings, read his mail, and scrutinize the contents of his computer. A person subjected to this treatment may find it degrading or unfair, but the courts have nothing to say about it. At stake, after all, is the irreducible core of a sovereign people’s power to protect themselves from intruders.”

For the several states along the border with Mexico, however, the federal government has surrendered its power … and thus its legitimacy.