Sovereignty? We don't need no stinkin' sovereignty!

When the Arizona state legislature passed an immigration enforcement bill which Gov. Jan Brewer subsequently signed into law, the public reaction was immediate, predictable and fierce. With images of cops randomly stopping people and demanding their papers, Arizonans were instantly branded as racists and fascists, and accusations of "racial profiling" were tossed around like confetti.

The Obama administration piled on before the DoJ even reviewed the new law, using it to demogogue the hell out of their political opponents. Municipal governments in other states jumped on the bandwagon, laying boycotts on Arizona, with San Francisco going so far as barring all but unavoidable official travel to the fascist state. One girls' high school basketball team even cancelled their participation in a tournament there.

And for what? A state law that requires police to check up on the immigration status of individuals in the course of "lawful contact" when an officer has reason to suspect the person's immigration status. Nothing in the law authorizes a cop to demand "papers" from people at random, and the law does nothing to expand the definition of "lawful contact" into areas incompatible with constitutional rights. Here's a link to the bill (SB1070), and you can see for yourself.

My own misgivings about the bill were around cops who might target Hispanics for "lawful contact" on some pretext, until it occurred to me that cops who are predisposed to that kind of thing don't need this law in order to do that. A bad cop is a bad cop, and this law won't turn a good cop bad.

I suspect the most vociferous opponents of the law fall into one (or more) of the following categories:

• La Raza: These are the folks (and their sympathizers) who view California and the Southwest United States as their own land, and all you white honky fuckers are on their soil.
• The Open Borders crowd: The idiots who don't believe in such archaic concepts as national sovereignty, artificial political borders, and - hey! pass the bong, dude!
• The average, garden-variety Leftist: Many of these also fall into the open borders category, but most of them simply view everything - everything - through the prism of race. And you're a racist right-wing pig for even thinking of enforcing immigration law.

What they all have in common is that their opposition is less about common sense than it is about driving a political agenda.

And, just as I was ready to hit "publish", Hot Air reports that California has had strikingly similar language in their state laws for years.