-By Warner Todd Huston
Thanks to SB167/HB470, Maryland is yet another U.S. State attempting to reward illegal immigrants with free or cut rate in-state university educations all at the detriment to the real citizens of the state — and all without the direct vote of the people. But this state version of the DREAM Act has resulted in some other attempted skullduggery, mainly violations of the state’s voting laws.
Here is what happened. Two Maryland legislators, Senator Victor Ramirez and Delegate Sheila Hixson of St. George’s County, introduced the bill in question that gave illegals in-state tuition to the state’s colleges – in other words, illegals will be taking the place of actual citizens at the state’s colleges. Even as the bill became law, the people of Maryland were not too happy with the whole thing. So, in time-honored fashion, the people of Maryland took up petitions to try and have a voice about being rid of this rewarding of illegals.
As it happens the citizens against this Maryland version of the DREAM Act didn’t just collect the requisite 18,579 (or so) petition signatures, they collected 40,000! This made the supporters of illegal immigrants suddenly all upset, as you can imagine, and here is where the lawbreaking came in.
Opponents of the folks trying to dump the illegal-supporting bill did what leftists always do. They began to bend, rip, distort and break the rules.
The libs trying to protect the favored status for illegals went to a friend in the government and somehow were able to get hold of all the petitions, then they were somehow allowed to remove all those petitions from the authorities, and they somehow were able to take all these petitions to a local copy shop so that they could make Xerox copies of all the petitions.
These leftists claim they wanted all the petitions so that they could “check the validity of the signatures.” Determining whether the signatures are fake or legit is not a leftist advocacy group’s job, of course. It is the job of the state. Still, it is obviously a lie, anyway. There is little doubt why these leftists want these names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers. It’s for one reason and one reason only and that would be to harass the voters that dared sign the petitions.
This tactic has already happened in California during the Prop 8 fight in 2008.
The main question here is simply this: how the heck is it legal for an advocacy group to take the voter’s petitions — a matter of law and the property of the state — away from the state (without any supervision at all, mind you) and remove them from government buildings? Certainly this is not legal. The state is not permitted to allow legal voter’s petitions to leave their hands once officially handed in and counted.
One imagines that this whole situation should end up in a lawsuit… or at least we hope so. One also imagines that the leftist groups and their inside government moles should be prosecuted, that the government officials in question should be summarily fired, and all involved should serve jail time.
… wouldn’t you think?
**Update**
Several days after the decision to give the illegal Immigrant activists all these petitions, the government reversed itself and told the CASA group that they would not be allowed to take the petitions.
But this only happened for one reason and that is because law abiding citizens put pressure on the illegal actions of the government and the illegal immigrant activists. If the good guys weren’t watching, the activists would have had those petitions in hand.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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