By Hank Beckman -
Is Mothers Against Drunk Driving still around? We haven’t heard from them much in recent years, but with drunk driving still common, one would think they’re still operating.
But in this age of journalists being, shall we say, somewhat less than rigorous about applying the old if-your-mother-says-she-loves-you-check-it-out standard, I thought it best to at least find out if they were still around before citing them in a column.
So I consulted my research assistant, Dr. Google (PhD, everything). Sure enough, MADD is still fighting the good fight against the carnage on our nation’s roadways that comes with irresponsible consumption of adult beverages.
So this might be an ideal time for someone in that organization to have a word with some of our elected officials.
They could start with Charlotte, North Carolina City Council Member Braxton Winston, a Democrat, who recently berated the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police for operating DUI traffic checkpoints in areas with high concentration of immigrants, essentially calling them liars.
Apparently, the enforcement operations were taking place around the same time and place that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers were conducting raids.
As can be seen on the Youtube video of the council’s Feb. 11 meeting, the department’s deputy chief explained that the checkpoints were entirely data-driven and the one in question was near the site of a fatality involving drunk driving the week before.
But Winston was having none of it
He implied he thought the timing suspicious and said because the police department never notified anyone about the ICE activity, “We claim plausible deniability and it hurts us.”
He further asked that the department “might call off one of these checkpoints because of the circumstance surrounding it.”
Then there is Senator Bob Menendez, (DEM-New Jersey) who criticized President Trump’s zero-tolerance polices during a debate over capping the number of beds available to ICE for criminal illegals.
Menendez’s argued that lowering the number of beds available would ensure that only the most dangerous criminals were detained.
About Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, he said “If you cross the border undocumented (Trump) has made you a criminal. If a person has a driving while under the influence (DUI) violation, he is now making that, saying that’s criminal.”
Is there another way to describe a person who gets arrested for driving a vehicle while intoxicated? Does the good senator have a different legal classification based on the race or the immigration status of the offender? Or is he in favor of different laws based on immigration status?
Lest anyone get the idea that this soft spot for illegals driving drunk is an exclusively Democrat quirk, former U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan is available to disabuse you of that notion.
During January 2016 appearance on the O’Reilly Factor, Ryan explained his resistance to pushing Kate’s Law, legislation named for Kate Steinle, the California woman gunned down by an illegal alien who had been deported numerous times.
The law would stiffen the penalties for those re-entering the country a second time, but Ryan was reluctant to push it because he feared it would needlessly “clog up our jails’ with illegals driving drunk.
Seriously, he said that. The then Speaker of the House of Representatives actually said on national television that he was worried about having too many drunk driving illegals to deal with.
Like Menendez, Ryan framed the issue as concentrating on the ability of government to deal with the “most dangerous” criminals, and to be fair, in the same interview, he took a stand against the sanctuary cities metastasizing throughout the nation.
MADD’s web site shows some of the most recent statistics on the carnage on our highways.
There are 300,000 incidents per day of people drinking too much and driving. While that obviously includes incidents not leading to injuries or loss of life, the site also shows 290,000 injuries per year and 10,876 deaths related to drunk driving every year.
Call me picky, but I think those numbers indicate a situation that qualifies as being fairly dangerous.
The majority of our elected officials, prominent media figures and academics are set in their desire to bring in more illegals; Democrats because they see potential voters and consumers of government services and Republicans because they see low-wage labor for their donors.
The human costs to American citizens is simply not something that most of them even consider. They’re more concerned about the human costs to people trying to break into our country.
The benefits to them are so important that many are willing to call off DUI checkpoints, not classify illegals as the criminals they are and balk at putting illegal drunken drivers in jail where they belong.
Anyone who thinks that we should avoid measures to combat drunken driving to accommodate illegals should ask Mary Ann Mendoza what she thinks.
Her son Brandon was the Arizona police sergeant killed by an illegal driving drunk three times over the legal limit—after driving the wrong way on a highway for 35 miles.
She could tell you all about the human costs of illegal immigration.
