Noting that the president will be in Texas for fundraisers this week, Governor Rick Perry extended an invitation to Barack Obama in a Fox and Friends interview Wednesday. “If he doesn’t come to the border,” Perry told the hosts, “I think it’s a real reflection of his lack of concern of what’s really going on there.” Perry claims that if the president was serious about tightening up the border between Texas and Mexico, the proof would be in his willingness to listen to lawmakers in close proximity. Alas, he finished his entreaty with an echo of sadness. “I haven’t even had a phone call from this president.”
Perry’s invitation to Obama comes at a time when the nation’s leader has shown a decisive lack of focus on border control, according to the governor. Of course, this lack of focus has manifested itself into a humanitarian crisis, with nearly 100,000 children – many of whom were unaccompanied – being apprehended at the border in the last eight months. By Perry’s reckoning, this mess comes as a direct result of Obama’s policy regarding immigration. He decried the administration’s veiled message that immigrants need only find a way across the border to gain citizenship of one kind or another. Looking at the president’s track record regarding aliens, it’s hard to argue with Perry’s logic.
Silicon Valley billionaire investor Tim Draper recently unveiled a plan to divide up California into six separate states because, in his view, “California’s diverse population and economies [have] rendered the state nearly ungovernable.” In the space below, I begin to identify some of the political and constitutional hurdles this proposal faces. Because the topic is vast and complicated, in today’s column I can do no more than spot and preliminarily analyze some of the major issues; if and when the proposed measure successfully moves through various stages of the political process, I shall likely offer a more detailed analysis of many of these questions.