Category: Guest Authors

Feinstein Replacement Assures 2024 Chaos

By Joe Guzzardi

During much of Dianne Feinstein’s 20 years in the U.S. Senate, I lived in California and wrote political commentary for two San Joaquin Valley dailies. Regardless of my topic, out of professional curiosity, I asked my subjects’ off-the-record opinion about the California governor and their local congressional representatives. When I inquired about Feinstein, most replied with indifference. At no point did I sense voter enthusiasm about Feinstein, or detect the feeling that, in their minds, her re-election was paramount to California’s well-being.

Yet, after Republican Sen. Pete Wilson resigned in 1991 to run for governor, Feinstein won the 1992 special election, and was then re-elected five times – 1994, 2000, 2006, 2012 and 2018, a remarkable achievement. Prior to her Senate success, Feinstein came in third in the 1975 San Francisco mayoral election to winner George Moscone, and lost the 1990 gubernatorial general election to Wilson. As so often happens in politics, death, retirement and shifting winds played a major role in Feinstein’s ascendancy.

Elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969, Feinstein served as the board’s president in 1978, during which time Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated. Feinstein succeeded Moscone as mayor, and Wilson’s decision to give up his Senate seat opened up national office opportunities for Feinstein which she capitalized on. When fellow Democrat Alan Cranston retired in 1993, Feinstein became California’s senior senator.

Once an established incumbent, and even though California was not yet the solidly blue state it is today – Republican Wilson was, after all, just a few years removed from his governorship – Feinstein coasted. Feinstein’s uninspiring GOP challengers, Tom Campbell, Dick Mountjoy and Elizabeth Emken eased her path.

As Feinstein’s Senate seniority advanced, she got plum assignments, including with the Senate Rules Committee. Feinstein also chaired the Select Committee on Intelligence, an ironic appointment since, as later discovered, she was chauffeured by a Chinese operative that the FBI suspected of gathering government secrets before he absconded back to China.

Considered a moderate when she arrived in Washington, Feinstein quickly adopted the established Democratic positions especially on an issue that roiled Congress from her career’s inception to its end: immigration.

In the early 1990s, at a press conference on the California-Mexico border, Feinstein said that illegal immigration was too costly to allow it to continue. In California alone, Feinstein continued, taxpayers spent $2 billion annually on illegal immigration. Feinstein added that illegal immigration involved a battle for “space” between the aliens and citizens – space for jobs, for classroom seats and for housing. More immigration means less space for citizens, said Feinstein.

Thirty years later, however, Feinstein joined the Senate’s open borders faction. Over her three decades in the Upper Chamber, Feinstein’s immigration grade dropped from C to D.

Unbeknownst to the public, Feinstein also championed private immigration bills. She introduced more bills that protected illegal immigrants from deportation than any other legislator. Her singular attempts to circumvent immigration laws to provide for her special causes mostly involved tourist visa overstays. Some remained unlawfully present for as long as 17 years after their visas expired, hardly compelling circumstances that require Senate intervention.

On October 2, Gov. Gavin Newsom named EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler to fill the remaining 15 months of Feinstein’s term. EMILY’s List works to elect female Democrats who support abortion rights. Per an August Federal Election Commission filing, Butler was a Maryland resident. Butler was then quickly sworn into office by Vice President Kamala Harris, for whom Butler had worked on Harris’ failed 2020 presidential campaign.

What happens next in the post-Feinstein era is uncertain. A special election involving Butler is probable, but no one knows whether the appointee or any of the other declared candidates for the full six-year term will run. Announced candidates Reps. Barbara Lee, Adam Schiff and Katie Porter are evaluating their decisions vis-à-vis the special election.

Despite California’s whopping $32 billion budget deficit, its affordable housing crisis, a soaring homeless population, endemic smash-and-grab crime and a collapsed education system, whoever permanently replaces Feinstein will vote straight “yea” on immigration expansion bills – as if more immigration is the solution to California’s monumental problems. Lee, Schiff and Porter have F- immigration grades from NumbersUSA.

Feinstein is gone, but her age, 90, and her vast $64 million wealth, exclusive of prime real estate holdings, raise questions about imposing term limits, and whether millionaires married to billionaires can fairly represent the average citizen. Feinstein commuted from San Francisco to D.C. on her private $6 million Gulfstream G650 jet. Term limits and personal wealth should but will never be considered as candidacy restrictions. Still, Feinstein’s congressional pro-immigration allies can take comfort that her replacement will carry on with the departed senator’s sovereignty-eroding immigration expansion legacy.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org.

Feinstein Replacement Assures 2024 Chaos

McCarthy Misses The Big Immigration Picture On Impeachment

By Joe Guzzardi

For all of Kevin McCarthy’s bluster about his impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden’s corrupt finances, skeptics have deep doubts about the House Speaker’s priorities.

The Biden family’s financial double-dealing is small potatoes compared to the nation’s lost sovereignty that the administration’s open border agenda promotes. While the evidence that Oversight Committee Chair James Comer uncovered reveals a well-established pattern of the Biden family’s dubious dealings, McCarthy has said little about the more compelling border disaster.

Biden’s blatant refusal to enforce even to the minimum extent the nation’s immigration laws is easily proven. This flagrant abdication of duty to enforce laws for the security and safety of U.S. citizens and sovereignty of the country represents a series of impeachable offenses. McCarthy, Comer, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, et al, don’t have to subpoena bank records, review the 5,400 emails that Biden wrote under his pseudonyms Robert Peters, Robin Ware and JRB Ware. House leadership simply has to visit the border to see that Biden has aided, abetted, facilitated, orchestrated and promoted illegal immigration, crimes for which he should be removed from office.

The latest Customs and Border Protection (CBP) stats are shocking, even for people who follow invasion data regularly. A total of 35,000 illegal aliens entered the U.S. for the weekend beginning Friday, September 15 and ending Monday, September 18, and CBP processed most of them. More accurately, CBP released 35,000 unvetted aliens into the interior. Previous surges included convicted criminals and possible terrorists on the FBI watch list.

In this unending human flow across the border, thanks to the Biden administration, consider also the doomed migrants who never reach their intended destinations. Their deaths are true human tragedies. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that in FY 2022 U.S. authorities discovered 890 bodies at the Southwest border, while hundreds of migrants are considered missing. Speculation is that somewhere in the border’s broad, rugged terrain, thousands more corpses lie undiscovered.

Human trafficking is a $150 billion industry, and traffickers have taken advantage of Biden’s inexcusable refusal to secure the homeland against foreign invaders who deliver deadly amounts of fentanyl and transport minors predestined for the sex trade or used and mistreated as underage labor. Federal code states that one single person found guilty of a trafficking violation will face a lengthy prison term, “potentially including life imprisonment for conduct involving actual or attempted killing, kidnapping, or aggravated sexual abuse.”

Taken on whole, the administration has, with Biden’s blessing, permitted one immigration crime after another. While Biden’s financial chicanery should lead to jail time, enriching of family won’t destroy the nation. But Biden’s open borders policy has the gravest of consequences – an end to sovereign America.

In a preview of future border-caused fiscal calamities to come for Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and other municipalities, Biden has brought New York City to its knees. Mayor Eric Adams is begging for a financial bailout to help subsidize the 110,000 migrants who have arrived in the Big Apple since April 2022. Evaluating his plight, Adams, speaking the truest words he’ll ever utter, said: “Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City.”

Adams has correctly summed up the migrant invasion: no ending is in sight for New York or the nation. To offset the city’s projected cost of $12 billion to support aliens, some progressive Democrats propose a 5 percent state tax, the so-called “migrant tax.”

The GOP’s pre-2022 Election Day “Commitment to America” failed to deliver on lofty promises, including a pledge to prevent illegal crossings, stop cartel trafficking, end catch-and-release loopholes and require legal status to get a job. Keeping score, that’s zero for four, a .000 average. Such an across-the-board GOP failure diminishes confidence in the party and puts Speaker McCarthy on shaky ground when he’s trying to sell his point of view, in this case that Biden’s financial hanky-panky is more important than vanished borders.

If voters were asked which of the two crimes they consider more egregious, Biden’s open borders – the consequences of which are ruining their communities – or the money laundering and influence peddling, the result would be a landslide. The outcome: Impeach Biden now before he can do more harm to American sovereignty.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifssp.org.

McCarthy Misses The Big Immigration Picture On Impeachment

The Disease That Killed Roger Maris; September Is Lymphoma Awarness Month

By Joe Guzzardi

During the waning weeks of September 1961, New York Yankees right fielder Roger Maris pulled away from teammate Mickey Mantle in the summer-long race to win the American League home run title.

The tension surrounding their pursuit to break Babe Ruth’s 60 homers in a single season record intensified when Commissioner Ford Frick decreed that to be recognized as legitimate, the M&M boys would have to hit number 61 within 154 games, the season’s length during the Big Bam’s career. But after 154 games, to the delight of his many detractors who thought Maris a colorless, unworthy journeyman who never even hit .300, he had only 59 round-trippers. Number 61 came on October 1 in the season’s finale at Yankee Stadium. 

A befuddled, irked Maris later asked: “When they say 154 games, which 154 games are they talking about? The first 154, the middle 154, the last 154? If it’s the first, then I’d still have tied Ruth, because I didn’t hit my first homer until the 11th game. If it was the last 154 or the middle 154, then I’d have broken it anyway.”

Maris comes to mind because September is designated Leukemia and Lymphoma Awareness Month by the American Cancer Society. At age 51, the lymphoma scourge took Maris’ life.

Despite setting a new single-season home run record, and winning two back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards, Maris’ six-year tenure with the Yankees from 1960 to 1966 was doomed. The press was unrelentingly critical, and its pro-Ruth and pro-Mantle stories, coupled with its anti-Maris news, influenced fans who showered boos on the player Yankee managers Casey Stengel and Ralph Houk admired for his five-tool skills. Roger could, insisted the two World Series’ champion managers, hit, hit for power, run, field and throw. Looking back on his 1961 home run season, Maris said that “it wasn’t worth the aggravation. I had so many people on my tail. People hated me for breaking Ruth’s record – especially the press.”

Maris’ critics could not have misjudged his character more completely. In his book “You’re Missin’ a Great Game,” Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog wrote about the winter of 1961 to 62 when he was building with his own hands a home in Kansas City. Maris, just coming off two consecutive MVPs seasons, including one in which he was the most famous man in the sports world, volunteered to help. Every frigid morning, at 7:30 sharp, Maris reported to work, packing his lunch pail, ready to pound nails.

As a sidebar to the then-raging debate about whether Ruth or Maris should be designated as the true home run king, the Society for American Baseball Research historian Brian Marshall calculated that the variable between Ruth’s 1927 record and Maris’ in 1961 isn’t the additional eight games played but the batters’ total plate appearances. Marshall’s conclusion: it may appear to be a “no-brainer that Maris would have more opportunity [he played more games] to accomplish his feat than Ruth did to accomplish his. The fact is that Maris actually had less opportunity on a per game basis [fewer plate appearances.]”

In December 1966, the ingrate Yankees who insisted Roger play while injured, essentially gave Maris away to the St. Louis Cardinals in exchange for third baseman Charlie Smith. In his two years with the Yankees, 1967 to 1968, Smith hit .224. Maris, on the other hand, led the Cardinals to two National League pennants during the same period.

Because of Maris’ hostile relationship with the Yankees and its fans, and despite new owner George Steinbrenner’s pleading, the home run king boycotted the Old Timers’ Games for a decade. Then, in 1978, without advance notice, Maris appeared to help raise the Yankees’ 1977 American league pennant. Introduced by Mantle, Maris received an unexpectedly warm reception.

Maris’ post-retirement years found him hanging out with old Yankees and Cardinals friends, and successfully managing a central Florida Anheuser-Busch distributorship, a gift from Cardinals owner Gussie Busch. Around Thanksgiving 1983, Maris began to suffer from headaches which continued into early 1984. At first, Maris ignored them. But, when he experienced intermittent difficulty breathing and developed numerous lumps over his body, he sought medical attention. Maris had lymphoma. His original diagnosis offered hope for a full recovery. After immediately beginning chemotherapy, Maris was optimistic. As the cancer progressed, however, Maris to no avail visited cancer specialists at New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital and Houston’s Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute. On December 14, 1985, Maris passed.

After Maris’ funeral in Fargo, North Dakota, St. Patrick’s Cathedral held a memorial service two days before Christmas. At the service’s end, Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor, looking at Maris’ grandchildren, said:

“In something somewhat unusual for this great cathedral, I’m going to ask those in attendance to give us one last burst of applause for your grandfather so that you can get some understanding about how New York truly felt about him, and get some idea of the cheers that used to fill the great Yankee Stadium.”

With that, everyone, including attendee President Richard Nixon, began to applaud, politely at first. Then, on their feet and in tears, loud chants of “RO-GER, RO-GER” filled St. Patrick’s. A long-overdue and fitting tribute to Maris, an outstanding but under-appreciated baseball hero, had finally been paid in full.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers Association member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

The Disease That Killed Roger Maris; September Is Lymphoma Awarness Month The Disease That Killed Roger Maris; September Is Lymphoma Awarness Month