No less than nature, politics abhors a vacuum.
The manifest irresponsibility that all parties in Sacramento continue to demonstrate toward the state budget already has had obvious economic and social consequences. The worst, however, probably is yet to come. The headlong flight by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the elected representatives of both political parties away from responsibility and into self-indulgent delusion also has created a dysfunctional vacuum in California's politics.
It's not a space that will remain empty for very long, and some of the ugliest currents in state politics already are seeping in. They'll soon have permission to function freely. The state's illegal immigrants -- 70% of them from Mexico -- are usually the target of choice when times get tough here, and this year is no exception. Some of the same people who tore California apart with Proposition 187, a 1994 initiative that would have denied illegal aliens state services had it not been held unconstitutional, are back for another turn at the wheel.
This time, as The Times' Teresa Watanabe reported Monday, they're raising funds to begin gathering signatures for a ballot measure that would deny welfare benefits to the 100,000 U.S.-born children of immigrant parents who would be poor enough to qualify for public assistance if they weren't in the country illegally. The children, of course, are U.S. citizens, and the proposal is almost certainly unconstitutional. Even so, it's probably only the first such measure that's going to surface. Given our dysfunctional initiative system -- which allows anyone with a few million dollars to hire professional signature gatherers to qualify virtually any measure for the ballot -- one or more of these dangerous and divisive measures is going to be decided in some future election.
Even the campaign to qualify the sort of initiative the anti-immigration factions now propose will be a wretched affair. In the state that is home to America's largest Latino population, such an effort to deprive mostly Mexican American children of their rights as U.S citizens is bound to engender understandable resentment and fear. In some ways, it could be an even uglier affair than the Republican-backed campaign for Proposition 187, which alienated Latino voters from the GOP in ways that have reverberated through our state's politics ever since.
