In politics, just as in life there must be priorities. One must decide what is more important given limited resources, time, manpower, etc. In politics priorities are often reversed, pressing and important issues, like Social Security, Crime and National Security must share the stage with unimportant or less pressing issues like baseball steroid use, immigration and Karl Rove. Very often politicians choose to focus on these non-issues because they generate media attention, while not requiring any degree of political skill or intellectual capacity to solve. Politicians in Georgia are not immune to this. Indeed, politicians feed on these non-issues as a means of demonstrating effectiveness to their constituents. Recently politicians in Georgia staged a rally at the state capitol to protest the scourges of illegal immigration. Now don’t get us wrong, illegal immigration is a problem and the nation would be well advised to get serious with regard to our porous borders. Before the likes of Al Qaeda use them to devastating affect. Illegal immigration, however, is largely a federal issue, not something that should be of paramount concern to state legislators in Georgia. Nonetheless, these GOP legislators railed against the use of tax payer dollars to fund public assistance programs for illegals, which is a rather moot point considering public assistance is only available to US citizens and resident aliens in the first place. There are a host of pressing issues before state governments, not least of which is the Supreme Court sanctioned effort to steal private property (i.e., eminent domain) for developers, something the state GOP was in favor of until the populace caught wind. We have since learned that organizers of the immigration rally paid homeless people to hold up signs and protest for the cameras, further demonstrating how unimportant this issue is. It’s a sad day when legislators are so desperate for attention that they will urge passage of bills to make illegal practices that are already illegal and pay bums to chant and carry on, just to boost their already over inflated egos.
Link to AJC article
Link to follow-up AJC article