Labor Day Special: Three Campaign News Items From Last Week and Three Quick Rants

$150,000 handouts to undocumented immigrants, ordering state universities to break federal law, and assuming a successful criminal prosecutor can't talk to a journalist without a chaperone

As you hopefully enjoy your Labor Day, I wanted to write on three news items affecting the 2024 campaign that caught my attention last week.

1. The California State Legislature passed new legislation enabling undocumented immigrants to receive $150,000.00 in down payment assistance to purchase new homes.¹

2. The California State Legislature passed new legislation ordering the University of California, as well as California State University and community colleges to hire undocumented immigrants in contravention of federal law.² The University of California had previously rejected the proposal due to legal issues.³

3. Third, Kamala Harris had her first interview with a journalist as a Presidential nominee.⁴ She drew criticism because Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz interviewed with her and many suggested that she needed her hand held for important interviews because could not handle something important on her own and can’t answer unscripted questions.

Because of the impact to the election these stories have, all three news items warrant commentary.⁵

I. $150,000.00 Down Payment Assistance to Undocumented Immigrants

I oppose this legislation. It’s not only bad politics for the Democratic Party, it’s fundamentally bad public policy.

For me, politically pro-immigration, it’s slightly strange to be on this side of the issue. There are many controversial policies regarding undocumented immigrants that I support and will defend against conservative criticism. For example:

1. The Sanctuary City. I support the original sanctuary city policy created in 1979 by Los Angeles Police Department Chief Daryl Gates, Special Order 40, which is an effective crime-fighting tool that protects otherwise law-abiding people from criminals and helps encourage cooperation with law enforcement from those who might otherwise be fearful to talk to the police.
   
   An undocumented immigrant who is a victim of a crime or witnesses a crime should know that they can go to the police to report the crime or talk to police investigators without fear of deportation. An American citizen or Green Card holding resident who lives with undocumented immigrants should know that they can go to the police without risk of getting their loved ones deported.
   
   As a society, the Sanctuary City policy (as it was originally created and enforced) makes us far safer.⁶

2. Driver’s Licenses for Undocumented Immigrants. Tyler Perry’s Madea once quipped that losing her driver’s license was just fine because “I still got keys, don’t I?”⁷ Undocumented immigrants obtain cars and drive on our roads. They simply did so without licenses and without auto insurance, creating potentially dangerous conditions for others on the road.
   
   Allowing undocumented immigrants to legally gain driver’s licenses helps teach them the rules of the road and helps them obtain auto insurance. This protects everyone else on the road. Additionally, providing a legal process to obtain a driver’s license reduces business for criminals who sell fake identification cards.

3. Allowing Undocumented Immigrants to Purchase Health Insurance. Those who lack health insurance and cannot see doctors when they are sick ultimately rely on emergency room care when they become seriously ill. For decades, this dragged down the level of care provided at our emergency rooms and drove up costs for taxpayers.
   
   By ensuring basic health insurance for tens of millions of previously uninsured, the Affordable Care Act has helped change this dynamic. People who are sick see doctors sooner. People can also get better preventative care. Most importantly, people don’t need to rely on emergency room care. It has created a healthier population and a more productive workforce.
   
   Enabling undocumented immigrants to purchase health insurance only furthers this policy by continuing to reduce the numbers of uninsured people. This reduces the costs to taxpayers and businesses.

4. Letting DREAMERs Attend California’s Public Universities. A DREAMER is an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the United States as a child. They are present illegally but through no real fault of their own. And in many cases, DREAMERS are fully assimilated into society, often unaware that they are not citizens, and often don’t even speak the language of their country of origin.
   
   For this reason, many advocate different and more lenient policies for DREAMERs who have lived otherwise law abiding lives. In the context of our great public universities in California, it’s a matter of simple fairness.
   
   Imagine a kid who grows up in the United States (unaware that their hard driving immigrant parents are undocumented) and works their tail off in high school to get the grades and test scores needed to get into their dream school.
   
   Should that kid be denied their place in UCLA or UC Berkeley that they rightfully earned simply because of actions that their parents or adult caretaker took?
   
   I certainly don’t think so. As a strong believer in having a meritocratic society, I don’t think that someone less qualified should be pushed ahead of someone who is more qualified simply because of something unrelated to their performance.
   
   Californians have long agreed, as a matter of constitutional law, that we do not want college admissions decisions based upon immutable characteristics that are an accident of birth.⁸ Allowing otherwise qualified DREAMERs to attend our public universities only furthers that constitutional requirement.

That said, I still believe that ideally, one should not be in this country illegally. One does not have to be Pete Wilson or Donald Trump to believe that either.

When we make these kinds of exceptions for undocumented immigrants, we are not rewarding people for being in this country illegally or encouraging unlawful entry into the United States.

Instead, we are acknowledging the practical reality that there are undocumented immigrants living in the United States, including many good, productive, and otherwise law-abiding citizens and implement policies that will benefit society as a whole.

In some instances, we look beyond a person’s immigration status and recognize basic humanitarian needs or implement basic fairness.

The policy of giving $150,000.00 to undocumented immigrants for home purchases does none of those things.

Spending money to help undocumented immigrants purchase homes does not protect citizens from crime, make our streets safer, prevent the spread of disease, reduce cost burdens on taxpayers for emergency room care, improve emergency room care services, or lower costs for businesses.

It’s not even humanitarian or ensuring fundamental fairness. No American is entitled to have the government buy them a home. And no one will die or suffer lifelong injury if they cannot afford a home in California, where housing affordability is a major issue for everyone.

Instead, it rewards those who break the law by offering them $150,000.00 from the State of California. And although one State Senator who voted for this bill emphatically insisted to me that it wasn’t a give away because it was a loan that had to be paid back, it is still an expenditure of taxpayer money since the funds leave the state treasury. Also, as most people know, some loans don’t get paid back.

It’s one thing to acknowledge the presence of undocumented immigrants and the necessity of making policies that include undocumented immigrants for the benefit of everyone else or condemn the mistreatment of undocumented immigrants at the hands of Trump, Pete Wilson, and the Republican Party. However, we shouldn’t go out of our way to encourage people to come or stay in the country illegally.

Politically, it could harm the Democrats in November. One of the reasons that President Biden had such low approval ratings was the chaos at the border, which is admittedly a complete mess.

One thing that has helped Kamala Harris is that after bipartisan Congressional agreement to a comprehensive bipartisan immigration reform bill that would have vastly improved the border, Donald Trump told his loyal Republican cult-followers in Congress to block the deal. He felt that no improvement of the border situation would help him politically.

Americans though saw through that. It’s one of the reasons that Tom Suozzi (D-New York) won a Congressional special election earlier this year, gaining a seat held by the Republicans, by campaigning on the border issue.⁹

However, the quickest way to reverse this momentum is to have Kamala’s deep blue home state acting to give $150,000.00 to undocumented immigrants. Voters will associate her with their actions and those who are concerned about the border will see a party that is deeply unserious when it comes to protecting the border.

II. Ordering California’s Public Universities to Hire Undocumented Immigrants

It is very clearly a violation of federal law to knowingly hire undocumented immigrants.¹⁰ This legislation, if signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, would violate the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution.¹¹

The federal government has authority over immigration laws, not states.¹² This is why when Arizona Republicans enacted the “Show us your papers!” law to punish undocumented immigrants, the United States Supreme Court held it was unconstitutional.¹³

Moreover, this is also likely a violation of the California Constitution when applied to the University of California.¹⁴ The University of California is its own independent branch of government.¹⁵ Ordering who the University of California must hire or not hire is not within the constitutional authority of the State Legislature.¹⁶ California State University does not have the same constitutional autonomy but it is supposed to be kept free of political influences - at least in theory.¹⁷

Our elected officials are presumed to know and follow the law.¹⁸ Like all elected officials, members of the California State Legislature are required to swear an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution to take office.¹⁹

By voting for something that is so clearly unconstitutional, legislators are violating their oath of office. One may dislike the current federal laws regarding the employment of undocumented immigrants. Advocating to change that law is perfectly fine. It’s even admirable. But that’s not the job of state legislators.

And for a moment, pity too the activists who push for such a law. When a political activist demands something that is unconstitutional and elected officials give in to their demands, they temporarily placate the activist. They avoid having to have the hard conversation of telling someone that what they want is something that they cannot honestly give them.

However, there’s a price to be paid for avoiding the difficult conversation and voting to give what they legally cannot. When courts strike the act down later as unconstitutional, the activist’s time and effort have been wasted. And many who pushed for an unconstitutional policy will ultimately lose faith in the political process.

Besides making the Democratic Party look weak on immigration, this legislation is even more problematic because California is actively ordering its state universities to break federal law. Voters who want the border fixed will see Kamala’s deep blue home state not only not fixing the problem, but breaking the law to make it even worse.

III. Assumptions Made About Kamala’s Abilities to Interview With Journalists

Even though it’s typically common for Presidential candidates post-convention to hold joint interviews with their running mates, a number of conservative critics argued it was unprecedent for Kamala Harris to conduct her first Presidential interview with Tim Walz at her side.

A common theme from commentators is that Kamala Harris is somehow a politician who needs to be “babysat” by others because she can’t be trusted on her own. And she cannot be asked unscripted questions. In his recent article, The Rise and Stall of Kamala Harris, conservative journalist and commentator

Andrew Sullivan

compared Tim Walz to an “emotional support animal”.

Sullivan is at least a fair conservative critic of Kamala Harris, focusing on genuine mistakes and policy differences (and not, among other things, the “outrageous” fact that Kamala didn’t disclose that she bought her two Gucci suits at the premium outlet store in Camarillo, California rather than the Gucci Store on Union Square).

But many are not and it has genuinely frustrated me because this conception of Kamala being unable to think for herself is so far off the mark. Do people not realize that she was a trial lawyer (one of the toughest professions there is) and prosecuted criminal cases?

Kamala Harris was a criminal trial litigator and she was particularly successful at it, obtaining convictions in cases that other prosecutors she worked alongside with did not want to take, including prosecutions of sex offenders in cases with seemingly unsympathetic victims.

She didn’t get a chaperone or an emotional support animal when she did that.

Trials are ultimately unscripted events. You have to know how to think on your feet when it comes to objecting to evidence being offered by the other side or opposing objections to your evidence from the other side.

What happens if you fail to object to evidence that hurts your case? You’re basically shit out of luck if you lose the case.²⁰

What happens if you fail to object to the exclusion of evidence that helps your case? Again, you’re basically shit out of luck if you lose the case.²¹

If you object to a piece of evidence in court, you have to cite the reason why you’re objecting and argue that to the judge. If the opposing party objects to a piece of evidence in court, you have to argue why that evidence should stay in. And sometimes, you have to point out why even though the other side’s objection might be correct, the evidence is still admissible under another evidence rule.²²

In other words, you have to think on your feet. Because if you can’t, you won’t make it.

Being a criminal prosecutor, as Kamala was, is even more difficult. Because if you fail to object to something that you should have or some evidence you need to gain a conviction gets excluded because you couldn’t argue why it should have been permitted, and the jury acquits the defendant, you cannot appeal that verdict.

The criminal walks free.

Unlike other less civilized countries, prosecutors in the United States don’t get to go back and try the case for second or third time until they get the result that they want.²³

It’s also worth pointing out that a prosecutor in Alameda and San Francisco Counties is not exactly in a place where it is easy to gain convictions. You’re operating in two of the most liberal jurisdictions in the planet.

When people talk about stereotypical left wing radicals in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, those are the very people who Kamala Harris had to persuade to convict criminal defendants. Your jury pool is going to include at least one old pony-tail wearing hippie who protested the Vietnam War and keeps an ACLU card in his wallet.

Persuading those jurors to convict is no easy task.

However, that is something she accomplished. If she could do those things on her own, she doesn’t need someone to hold her hand through an interview with a journalist. And the suggestion otherwise is an attack that is not based in any kind of reality.

IV. What are Your Thoughts?

Having ranted, I’d love to hear from my subscribers. Do you agree with the policy of giving $150,000.00 in down payment assistance to undocumented immigrants? Do you agree with ordering the University of California to hire undocumented immigrants? What were your thoughts on Kamala Harris’s first interview?

Please let me know in the comments! Happy Labor Day!

1. https://reason.com/2024/08/29/california-legislature-extends-exhausted-homebuyer-subsidies-to-illegal-immigrants/?utm_medium=reason_email&utm_source=new_at_reason&utm_campaign=reason_brand&utm_content=Project%202025%20Is%20No%20Match%20for%20MAGA%20Dysfunction&utm_term=&time=August%2029th,%202024&mpid=442751

2. https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_964c7962-6586-11ef-86af-bb54945a98dd.html

3. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/26/1227247600/the-university-of-california-denies-campus-jobs-for-undocumented-students

4. https://apnews.com/article/harris-bash-interview-cnn-5573b57437f6257f8946180e867c54dd

5. The author of this article is an attorney licensed to practice in the State of California and the District of Columbia. This article and all of the works on this Substack page are statements of the opinions of the author, only, and do not constitute legal advice; they are not intended to be relied upon by any individual or entity in any transaction or other legal matter, past, pending, or future. A paid subscription to this Substack page supports the author’s scholarship and provides access to research that the author has compiled, but does not establish an attorney-client relationship. The author does not accept unsolicited requests for legal advice or representation, and this Substack page is not intended as legal advertising. The opinions expressed on this Substack page reflect the personal views of the author only.

6. I take issue with some Sanctuary City policies that aim to protect known criminals, especially violent criminals accused of felonies, and keep them in the country. That does not make us safer as a society and goes well beyond the protective purpose of these policies. There’s a difference between a hard working, law abiding, immigrant who contributes to our society who happens to be undocumented and a person who repeatedly violates laws. We should be able to distinguish.