Free Republic

Democratic Governor Jerry Brown once fought to keep out South Vietnamese refugees from being delivered to his state during his first stint as governor of California in the 1970’s. Although he remains silent on the crisis that is happening on the southern border of his state, Brown’s position via legislation previously signed regarding illegal immigrants from Mexico Central America and South America is more favorable than the cool response he gave to the Vietnamese refugees who had escaped the tyrannical Viet Cong.

Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions warned California on Wednesday that "there is no secession" from federal jurisdiction as he appeared before members of the California Peace Officers Assn. in Sacramento to announce a lawsuit against three so-called "sanctuary state" laws. To no one's surprise, his claims drew immediate rebukes from state officials. Gov. Jerry Brown's initial response after the suit was filed late Tuesday stands as one of the better jabs in this political fight: "At a time of unprecedented political turmoil, Jeff Sessions has come to California to further divide and polarize America. Jeff, these political stunts may be the...

California's three new "sanctuary" laws, challenged in court this week by the Trump administration, face different hurdles and have varying vulnerabilities, legal experts said Wednesday. Law professors who read the lawsuit filed by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions generally described it as a credible challenge that presents complex legal questions that might wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court. "The arguments made by the Justice Department are not at all lightweight arguments," said Pepperdine law school professor Douglas W. Kmiec. "They are quite substantial." The federal government has wide authority over matters of immigration, and Sessions has charged that California's new...

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions sued California this week for not doing enough to find and punish unauthorized immigrants, and said on Wednesday he was girding for an epic battle. “California is using every power it has — and some it doesn’t — to frustrate federal law enforcement,” he said in a speech in Sacramento. “So you can be sure I’m going to use every power I have to stop them.” One of the weapons Mr. Sessions is counting on is a 2012 Supreme Court ruling siding with the Obama administration, which had sued Arizona for violating federal immigration...

“States rights” was a curse in the mouths of liberals when it came to condemning southern segregationists in the Jim Crow era. But for liberals today, the right of states like California to defy federal immigration law has suddenly become a hallowed principle. Take Joseph Alioto Veronese, candidate for San Francisco DA. On his Fox News show tonight, Tucker Carlson challenged Veronese: “it is now illegal for private citizens in California to assist federal law enforcement authorities [regarding illegal immigration] . . . how is that different from what happened in the South in the ’50s and ’60s?” Responded Veronese:...

Liberal policy failure is all around us and destroys lives every day. In California, the destruction of society and individual lives has become so overwhelming, the state’s liberal overseers now spend their time covering up where they can and normalizing the chaos as much as possible. Since 2013, when now-liberal icon Eric Garcetti was elected mayor of Los Angeles, and the nation had just re-elected Barack Obama as president, Los Angeles’ homeless population skyrocketed 46 percent. During the Obama years, where unchallenged liberalism was pushed and accepted (wrongly) as the new normal, we saw the leftist economic menace rage through...

San Francisco is experiencing a “mass exodus” as tens of thousands of residents leave the Bay Area while an influx of immigrants flood the sanctuary city, according to KPIX-TV. What’s going on? For the first time in decades, more people are leaving San Francisco than there are new people moving to the city. The mass exodus has propelled the Bay Area to the nation’s leading city for “out-migration.” One of the reasons for the exodus is the cost of living in San Francisco. According to the Mercury News, the median price for homes in Silicon Valley fall anywhere between $800,000...

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Allen Sumner on Friday said California must consider early parole for thousands of sex offenders, the Associated Press reported. About the Lawsuit Janice Bellucci, a Sacramento attorney and president of Alliance for Constitutional Sex Offense Laws, was the one who filed the lawsuit on behalf of sex offenders. According to Bellucci, the rules the CDCR were putting in place directly conflicted "with the ballot measure's language and voter's intent in approving Proposition 57." From the Associated Press: Bellucci argued the measure requires earlier parole consideration for any sex crime not on the state's narrow...

The LAPD has submitted three sexual abuse cases against Harvey Weinstein to the L.A. County District Attorney’s office for possible charges, a spokesman said Thursday. No details of the allegations were released. The LAPD has previously acknowledged that it was investigating a claim that Weinstein raped an Italian model at a hotel in 2013. The LAPD also said it was investigating an allegation that Weinstein committed “lewd acts” in 2015. The LAPD submitted the three cases on Feb. 1. The D.A.’s office can choose to file a case or decline to prosecute, but it may also request additional investigation or...

Radical left-wing icon former California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums was a hired lobbyist for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. June 9, 2016, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned. Dellums, who represented liberal San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., is a long-time darling of left-wing political activists. He served 13 terms in Congress as an African-American firebrand and proudly called himself a socialist. He retired in 1996. The former congressman is one of several high-profile Democratic partisans who was on Veselnitskaya’s payroll, working to defeat a law that is the hated object of...

Gov. Jerry Brown D-Calif. has once again denied parole for Leslie Van Houten, the youngest follower of late murderous cult leader Charles Manson who blamed herself at her parole hearing Friday for letting him control her life. Brown said in his decision that Van Houten, 68, still laid too much of the blame on Manson, who died two months ago at 83. Brown acknowledged that Van Houten's youth at the time of the crime, her more than four decades as a model prisoner and her abuse at the hands of Manson make it worth considering her release. While in prison,...

California lawmakers are targeting the expected windfall that companies in the state would see under the federal tax overhaul with a bill that would require businesses to turn over half to the state. A proposed Assembly Constitutional Amendment by Assemblymen Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, and Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, would create a tax surcharge on California companies making more than $1 million so that half of their federal tax cut would instead go to programs that benefit low-income and middle-class families. “Trump’s tax reform plan was nothing more than a middle-class tax increase,” Ting said in a statement. “It is unconscionable...

The Republican-backed federal tax bill flipped the tables on a never-ending question for California politicians: Will high taxes lead the state’s wealthiest residents to flee the Golden State for the comparable tax havens of Florida, Nevada and Texas? Republicans reliably raise that alarm when Democrats advocate for tax increases, like the 2012 and 2016 ballot initiatives that levied a new income tax on very high-earning residents. But now, with the federal tax bill cutting off deductions that benefited well-off Californians, the state’s Democrats suddenly are singing the GOP song about a potential millionaire exodus. “People with higher incomes pay a...

There is no written article. Only a video.

Public employees in California may have their pension benefits slashed due to the rollback of a longstanding rule in the state, Gov. Jerry Brown revealed in a recent budget briefing. The California governor revealed that he has a “hunch” legal proceedings could pave the way for cuts to public employees’ benefits. “There is more flexibility than there is currently assumed by those who discuss the California rule,” Brown said during the briefing.

Video at link. Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan said California "better hold on tight" after its liberal Democratic governor allowed a sanctuary state law to take effect this week. Neil Cavuto said that Gov. Jerry Brown claimed the law will protect illegal immigrants living quietly in the shadows of society from law enforcement intent on "yanking them out of there." "I think it's terrible," Homan said, adding that Brown's action put politics in front of public safety.

Jerry's Real Legacy Pardonne moi, Governor Jerry Brown, but California is a cesspool and you are giving absolution to criminals. Brown’s smug ‘burn it down and leave’ attitude, together with all of the left, is based on the self-righteous belief that more than half of the country does not know what’s good for them—and liberals and leftists do. They hate us for not aspiring to their glamorous and important lives, and then feel compelled to tell us how to live.

<p>Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow who focuses on Islamic terrorism and the radical left.</p> <p>The original civil war was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new civil war is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.</p>

In California governor Jerry Brown’s endless attempts to drag California to third world nation status, he is now pardoning immigrants convicted of felonies in order to save them from being deported. The Sacramento Bee reports: Escalating the state’s showdown with the Trump administration over illegal immigration, California Gov. Jerry Brown used a Christmas holiday tradition to grant pardons Saturday to two men who were on the verge of being deported for committing crimes while in the U.S.

... Loath to let a natural disaster go to political waste, the California Air Resources Board used the fires to promote a new climate-change “scoping plan” aimed at doubling the rate at which it cuts carbon emissions. The irony is that the emissions from wildfires could negate all of the state’s anticarbon policies. A 2007 study in the journal Carbon Balance and Management found that California’s wildfires in 2003, which burned more than 750,000 acres, produced the monthly carbon equivalent of about half of the state’s fossil-fuel burning sources. Ditto the state’s September 2006 wildfires. On average the state’s annual...