Buncombe County Democratic Party convention

Last Saturday was Buncombe County Democratic Party convention. Boy, that was a mixed bag. My resolution on helping the Iraqi refugees passed, although some did speak against it (that resolution came from an Out-of-Iraq phone call with PDA, by the way). Xenophobia is definitely growing.

The resolution telling local law enforcement not to cooperate with the feds with immigration enforcement was the first resolution discussed – they even had the local sheriff speak against it. Apparently, the whole bunch of them cannot tell the difference between enforcing inhumane federal immigration policies and arresting people for crimes. So, the pulling people off of trains and buses will continue, along with the 2 AM raids of homes. The sheriff seems to think that he is working well with the latino community here – but I have heard that they are terrified of him. And, wow, are there a number of folks in the room who are vastly ignorant of what is going on with the local immigrants and what factors are driving all of this mess.

Cecil Bothwell, who is running for county commissioner, sent this out to the folks running the Buncombe Country Democratic Party convention (reprinted with his permission). He specifically addressed it to Doug Jones, who was in charge of running the resolution process.

Doug,

I thought you did a superb job navigating the convention through the resolutions. Your grasp of the rules and adeptness in running the meeting greatly facilitated the whole process.

One item still bugs me a little, and that was calling on Van Duncan as a legal adviser concerning the resolution that was deleted. I have a great deal of respect for Duncan as a law enforcement official, but police aren't supposed to make the laws. They enforce the laws we create and I believe we are on very dangerous ground if we grant police veto power over legal matters.

In this specific instance, conflating cooperation between law enforcement agencies for the purpose of enforcing the criminal code with using local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law is wrong. The language of the resolution was quite clear about that distinction, and if it was less than clear to anyone, it could have been amended. At minimum, we should have heard from a lawyer or legal scholar on the subject and not deferred to the opinion of a single law enforcement officer.

I wouldn't make an issue of this if I didn't regard it as a central matter in this era of fear-mongering, federal invasion of personal privacy, Halliburton's contract for construction of concentration camps, the USA PATRIOT Act and all of the other police-state elements assembled by Bush and others. The structure they have created and the fear they have mongered will not automatically go away after the election. We are truly living in perilous times. My high regard for Duncan, for example, is the mirror image of my opinion about his predecessor. Not every municipality has a Duncan, there are a lot of Medfords out there.

Mumpower (and many other Republicans) are calling explicitly for the use of local law enforcers in their xenophobic assault on immigrants. (The fact that the war is phony and only created for the purpose of getting votes and keeping wages down doesn't matter. They are enforcing ICE now, across the country.) This is a clear political battle line and failure to address such issues is one of the reasons people say there is no difference between the two parties.

I wrote this in response:

I was thinking about this issue in church this morning. I did not press forward with an amendment to the resolution primarily because I believe that the resolutions really don't do much, and even if we spent a lot of time passing them, the elected officials just ignore them. (I think that fact is behind the reduced number of resolutions, by the way. Just think how far we got in the Democratic Party with the impeachment resolutions, passed in multiple states!)

And if elected officials are going to ignore resolutions, you can bet your bottom dollar that local sheriff's office will too.... in fact, they likely will ignore whatever they want, in spite of elected officials, unless those officials keep after them.

It was distressing to me to see that Van Duncan does not grasp the difference between immoral and stupid federal immigration laws and actual criminal behavior. But then, he never "got it" concerning the deputy's break-in to the Kuhn's home either. Now anyone can make mistakes, but these types of mistakes are very destructive to people's lives and our communities. (And I don't know why I care so much about these issues - they are very unlikely to impact on my life and I can always just move to Canada!)

So, my conclusion is that the best course of action is to elect Bothwell, since he does GET IT. And maybe he can get other commissioners to GET IT too - or at least talk some sense in Duncan.

I thought the convention, on the whole, was a mixed bag. It seemed like there was reverential silence towards Shuler, who …… acts like a republican on many occasions. There were many examples in the convention of xenophobia. I really loved the guy who said that immigrants who already live here and want to go to NC colleges should get documentation. That is equivalent to telling a woman who complains about not getting paid as well as a man to stop complaining and grow a penis - except, sex change operations are possible, and getting documentation of legal status by the federal government is about impossible, and if possible at all, it is a 14 to 20 year proposition. AND our federal government does that on purpose..... just like they refrain from arresting and prosecuting big employers of undocumented workers, and just like they keep the ICE arrests random (the last is to install fear - midnight raids of homes, just like in Baghdad.)

I sometimes wish all the undocumented people in this country could up and leave tomorrow. That would mean $10 for a head of lettuce and $15 for a pound of tomatoes by June.

Photo was taken by Emily M. in DC in January 2006. The banner belongs to Veterans for Peace, Chapter 99, Asheville.