Civil Disobedience, Local Government Edition

It's finally happened: two illegal immigrants have been appointed to government office in California.

Now, to be fair, these are unpaid positions (insert joke about immigrants working for lower wages) and they are advisory in nature. You can read the details if you like but it boils down to this: The city of Huntington Park has appointed two illegal immigrants to positions as commissioners of health and parks, respectively. With these appointments, Huntington Park has effectively declared itself above federal law.

This is a good thing.

While I'm not in favor of America's current hypocritical immigration situation that made people like my friend Sata, a multi-lingual Dutch citizen of Japanese ancestry with numerous professional qualifications, wait a decade to get a freaking green card but which allows penniless Mexicans to swell welfare rolls in the Southwest, I fully support the idea of rebellion, however minor, against higher authority.

Like the country recorder who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses on ethical principles, the city of Huntington Park has decided that they need to reserve the right to defy the Feds. When something like this happens, it causes friction in the system, and friction in the system is how we prevent the arrival of fascism wearing the American flag.

Or Communism wearing the American flag, if you like --- but the current cozy arrangement between multinational corporations and the Federal Government is far closer to traditional National Socialism than Trotsky Socialism.

So bully for Huntington Park. But here's the problem. The various officials who have refused to comply with the Supreme Court diktat on same-sex marriage have all been removed or disciplined in fairly short order. Will Huntington Park's next council meeting feature a surprise appearance by the Immigration and Naturalization Service?

If it does not --- if we continue to live in this Obama era where the feds only enforce the laws that are currently popular --- then we have a far more troubling problem than any amount of civil disobedience could cause. We have a county where some laws are more equal than others. And when that happens, we are no longer a nation under the rule of law as we know it.