Victor Davis Hanson: When the Left Ignores Federal Law and Sounds Like Neo-Confederates
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: So, Victor, I asked two questions from Barry McDonald in the last episode. We’re doing two vacation episodes, you and I are. I know you’re doing two with the great Sami Winc. And he asked simply about sanctuary cities.
Victor, tell us: What are their dangers, their legal loopholes? I don’t know if you need to get into that. How did they come to be? Victor, you’ve talked about sanctuary cities before. They’re not just a simple happenstance in America. I think they’re dangerous things. But what do you think, my friend?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, they’re unconstitutional, that’s for sure. And I will just preface my answer with this: If Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, conservatives, Republicans adopted the idea of sanctuary cities, a neo-Confederate states’ rights idea right out of the mouth of John C. Calhoun, they would do something like this.
They would say, “The state of Utah, or a city of Casper, Wyoming, or Mobile, Alabama, we declare that we don’t honor the Federal Endangered Species Act. We just don’t honor it. So, if we have a developer and he’s carving out a golf course and there is a three-eared toad that’s endangered, he’s just gonna smash him because we don’t honor federal law here. We’re not gonna cooperate with the [Environmental Protection Agency].”
Or if somebody in a county, I’m not picking on states, I’m just doing it randomly, but let’s say a county in Arkansas said, “You know what? I can read the Second Amendment. It says I have a right to bear arms. And I find in our county, we’ve decided that it is unconstitutional to make you register a handgun with the federal government. So, we are a sanctuary city, and no one in this county in Arkansas is gonna register any federal guns, and we’re not gonna cooperate at all with the ATF, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. If they try to come in here, we’re gonna protest, we’re gonna combine, we’re gonna do everything we can.”
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Well, you can imagine what would happen. A Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton would say, “You’re an insurrectionist.” And they would call out federal troops because, in the Constitution, it’s clear that in matters of federal law, they trump state law. And that is a federal matter: immigration.
Somehow, we have over 600 entities, counties, cities, entire states like California. And that means that when law enforcement arrest, if you’re in California—and I’ve had this happen four or five times in the last 40 years, where an illegal alien on a Sunday afternoon or Saturday night went airborne drunk and plowed in and took out 10 almond trees or 20 vines, and we heard a big crash, and we went out there, and the car was littered with drugs and alcohol bottles, and the driver took off. Or sometimes, on two occasions, he was there.
I call the police and, first of all, I couldn’t possess the car. They wouldn’t let me tow it away or keep it to pay for the thousands of dollars of damage. But when they took him in and bailed him out, I said, “Are you gonna deport him if he’s illegal?”
“No, we’re not gonna deport him. We can’t.”
I mean, “We’ve had this now for, I guess, 15 years. We’re not gonna deport him. We don’t recognize federal immigration law here in California.”
And then you say, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t go to Yosemite. Maybe the federal government should say, ‘We own Yosemite, and we don’t want you to go into our national park until you honor our national law. You’re an American first and a Californian second.’”
But they get away with it. They get lower-court judges to rewrite the law.
And Donald Trump is the first president—and people should remember that, who are so critical of him. He’s the first person to challenge it. And he has tried to cut off transportation funds to these cities and some federal funds to these cities and entities and counties and states that break federal law.
And of course, the lower courts have opposed him. It’s a neo-Confederate idea. I thought we settled the issue, Jack, with Fort Sumter, which was a federal fort. Lincoln fortified it, and South Carolina fired on it. And they said, “Oh, it’s in our proximity.”
And Lincoln said, “No, no, no, no. It’s a federal fort. It’s federal land. And by the way, post offices and armories in your Confederacy don’t belong to you. They’re federal property.”
And that was really the pretext of the whole Civil War. The real issues were slavery, of course, and states’ rights, but the trigger was they were not going to let federal troops occupy federal property, which was illegal.
So, all of a sudden, I guess the Left has turned into right-wing states’ rights people.
Fowler: Yeah.
Hanson: And it won’t stop until the federal government goes to the Supreme Court and says, “You have the right to deny federal funds to entities that break federal law.” And believe me, they don’t allow any state, any red state, purple state, or county to defy federal law. Right. You know what I mean?
Fowler: Yeah. I’m always struck by that, Victor, the accessibility to federal funds. From our youth, mine anyway, the implementation of the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit was somehow tied to if you didn’t do it, you weren’t getting federal funds.
Hanson: Exactly. I remember that.
Yeah. I think it was Montana or Wyoming that said, “We’re not gonna do it.”
Fowler: Yeah.
Hanson: And they said, “If you don’t do it, you’re not going to get federal funds.” I don’t know why we can’t do that again.
Yeah. But what it means is you arrest somebody for drunk driving or for murder or for assault, and if he posts bond or there is no cash bail and you let him out, we used to say that you check their immigration status and you called [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. And then ICE showed up, and they got him, and they looked at him, and they deported him if it was a crime that was a minor felony or a misdemeanor. They deported him immediately.
But now, as we saw with that judge, if ICE shows up at a hearing, not just on immigration status, but a felon, and they know that an illegal alien is there, the judge, as we saw in that one case, helped him escape from ICE.
Fowler: The Wisconsin judge who got a rap on the hands.
Hanson: Yeah. Nothing really happened to her.
They didn’t really do much to her. And law enforcement is ordered by these sanctuary mayors and governors and supervisors not to cooperate. It’s against the law.
[New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani will fire you if you are a policeman and you arrest an illegal alien, and when he gets out of jail, you call ICE.
Fowler: Yeah. We talked on a recent episode about these 21 blue states and the District of Columbia suing the federal government over, you talked about it, illegal licenses. It just struck me while you were talking: It’s a crime, I guess, to be here illegally and to have a CDL license. But what about the people who are handing out the CDL licenses who are government workers? There is some criminal stuff.
There’s a federality going on there.
Hanson: Yeah, there is. You remember, was it a candidate for governor in Maryland or somewhere that had an illegal alien living in their loft, in their barn, or garage? And people cited a statute that said knowingly harboring an illegal alien and abetting him was a crime. It is, but no one …
You know, the Left just says, “There’s your law, and then there’s our sense of morality, our law, and we’re better, we’re smarter than you are. We’re more morally superior. So, we like the law when it’s convenient, and it can be used to advance our agenda or to hurt your agenda. But otherwise, we don’t really follow it. We don’t really care.
“If we don’t have the court, we want to pack it. If we won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, we want to get rid of the Electoral College. If we can’t win enough senators, we want to bring in two states and get four senators. If we’re in the minority, well, then the filibuster is great. When we’re in the majority, it’s a racist holdover.”
They’re like adolescents. They really are. Anybody that’s raised teenagers knows that they always look at the entire world through their self-interest for a year or two until they grow up. But they never grew up. They’re arrested development.
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