I had the opportunity to see Assemblyman Donnelly speak at the NorCal Liberty Summit in Sacramento this past weekend, where addressed a libertarian-oriented audience of around 60, and I must say that he came across to me as being more of a Tea Party conservative than a Ron Paul libertarian. Most of his speech focused on the promise of California, how it's been ruined, and the tax and regulatory policies that have ruined it.
Three specific issues he touched on struck me as problematic:
(1) Human trafficking. Donnelly noted that 83% of Californians agree with this (likely a slightly off reference to last year's Proposition 35, which was unfortunately passed by just over 81% of voters -- see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/prop-35-passes-california_n_2089305.html ), and appeared to believe that cracking down on this is an issue he can successfully campaign on. As a sex worker myself, and someone familiar with the issue, I sure hope he doesn't.
I was part of the campaign *against* Prop. 35, and I can tell you that the issue is largely based on political hype and fearmongering. Opponents are using it to go after consensual prostitution among adults, which they have tried to conflate with non-consensual pimping, trafficking, and abuse of minors. The main cause of trafficking, as I tried to explain to Donnelly in my question to him at the event, is border controls: Poor people from other countries want to come to the United States for greater economic opportunity, and because their avenues for peacefully doing so are onerous, expensive and time-consuming if not impossible (see e.g. http://reason.org/news/show/1003252.html ), are often forced to rely on black market smugglers to help them gain entry.
Of course paying those people is expensive, and being poor, the would-be immigrants often do not have the money, so the smugglers are often compensated for their risks and expenses via agreements whereby the migrants repay them from money they earn working in the United States once they arrive. Incentives to keep their word on this include the threat of arrest and deportation if they are reported as undocumented, as well as possible harassment of family members back home. Many Asian female immigrants go to work at massage parlors, some of which are de facto brothels. But if the massage places get raided and they are arrested, these prostitutes face a stark choice. If they tell the truth and admit they are there consensually, they will almost certainly be arrested and deported with criminal records. But if they lie and testify against their employers by saying they were trafficked against their will and are being kept on the premises as sexual slaves, they can sometimes gain refugee status, and become eligible to stay in the U.S. and receive various forms of government and non-government assistance. It's not difficult to see why this is a tempting option.
Although there are some cases of actual coercive trafficking, just as there is actual crime and violence in the black market drug trade, only reducing obstacles to immigration and not more law enforcement, is likely to make a serious dent in these kinds of abuses that criminalized markets attract. And beyond the dynamic I describe above, there have been numerous articles exposing the trafficking scare as vastly inflated (see e.g. http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-06-29/news/real-men-get-their-facts-straight-sex-trafficking-ashton-kutcher-demi-moore/). An excerpt from this article describes how the scare has fueled a government-funded industry:
"In 2005 and 2006, the federal government spent $50 million primarily to fund law enforcement task forces involving U.S. Attorneys, local police,FBI and Department of Homeland Security agents, and various nonprofits. The task forces were created to put an end to sex and labor trafficking in America. Today, there are more than 40 such task forces, from Boston to Anchorage, each typically funded with $450,000 for three-year terms.
"In 2010, Congress disbursed over $21 million to nearly 100 groups—including municipalities and local law enforcement agencies—that are fighting sex and labor trafficking.
"You never hear in the media from the majority of these folks. But others have clear religious or prohibitionist agendas: U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops ($4 million), World Relief Corporation of National Association of Evangelicals ($60,000), Polaris Project ($800,000), the Church United for Community Development ($150,000), and Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking ($250,000).
"The Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces, also composed of local and federal law enforcement agencies, have investigated child pornography and prostitution cases since 1998. Generally, the units receive tens of millions of dollars annually. As part of the government stimulus package, Uncle Sam handed out $75 million to ICAC groups in 2009.
"In the past eight years, Congress has spent $200 million on child pornography in America and another $180 million on all domestic trafficking involving sex or labor."
(2) Immigration. Donnelly is a former leader in the vigilante "Minuteman" movement, and his positions on this critical issue reflect that. At the Liberty Summit he spoke in favor of making it even more difficult for people to become citizens, by disallowing children of migrants from becoming citizens automatically if they are born in the United States. Denying people in this country who are required to pay taxes the ability to vote is a violation of the founding American principle of "No Taxation Without Representation." It also hurts the economy by making it more difficult for employers to legally hire the workers they need, and by criminalizing more innocent people, further disrupts lives, creates suffering, and creates yet another wasteful claim on taxpayers' money in order to enforce the law. He has also opposed the "DREAM" act that would make it easier for children brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents to get into educational institutions in order to gain job skills, and even introduced an "Arizona-style" anti-immigrant measure that would require employers to use a government electronic verification program to check on their employees, and has written things such as:
"The facts are incontrovertible that allowing an illegal invasion of the United States will destroy the American Southwest, and very probably wipe out the freedoms we American Christians enjoy, as Muslim Extremists blend in with the so-called 'innocent' illegal aliens, and eventually proselytize them."
(from http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2010/12/tim_donnelly_arizona_law.php )
(3) The Peripheral Canal. Donnelly said he wants to build the long-disputed "Peripheral Canal", a huge project that would take more water from the Sacramento river delta to southern California. This is a potential multi-billion dollar boondoggle and environmental disaster in the making. Jerry Brown tried to do this the first time he was governor, and voters rejected it in 1982. But now he's back with a plan that critics say could cost over $54 billion (see http://www.calitics.com/tag/Bay%20Delta%20Conservation%20Plan%20(BDCP) .
Donnelly said he opposes building "tunnels" as Brown's plan would, but he was vague on what kind of alternative he would support, and said nothing about the cost. The fact is that building large-scale water projects that subsidize agricultural interests is simply not a proper function of government. The basic problem which has led to this perceived "need" is that too many agricultural concerns are trying to grow water-intensive crops in dry areas of southern California that do not naturally support them, and relying on water taken from the north to maintain them. The state government has been perpetuating this environmentally harmful practice for decades by subsidizing that water at taxpayer expense by providing it to farmers at far below market rates. The expensive "peripheral canal" that Donnelly says he wants to build would potentially make the situation much worse.
On the positive side, I am thankful for Donnelly's recent support in the state legislature (he is currently a member of the state assembly representing the 33rd district, a vast region of southern California largely overlapping with San Bernardino county -- see http://www.legislature.ca.gov/legislators_and_districts/districts/assemblydistricts.html ) for a resolution opposing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) a piece of unconstitutional legislation which among other things purports to give the federal executive branch the police state power to indefinitely detain people including American citizens without due process, at the discretion of the President (see e.g. http://rt.com/usa/obama-ndaa-appeal-suit-229/ ). On the other hand, this may have been an unusual stance for him; in a video I watched of a hearing on that resolution, one of the legislature's Democrats made a passing comment or joke about how unexpected it was to see Donnelly supporting civil liberties, or words to that effect.
He also deserves kudos for reporting and explaining how he has voted on his Facebook page ( https://www.facebook.com/pages/Assemblyman-Tim-Donnelly/169341843174122 ). One can see from that page that he is a strong supporter of gun rights, generally opposes tax measures, and is not afraid to cast the lone vote against a bad piece of legislation. And I'll give him some credit for consistency/integrity for pitching the peripheral canal to a mainly northern California audience, even if he did not spend much time talking about it.
For those who are still registered Republican and voting in the GOP primary, Donnelly could be a good choice. I don't know who else may be seeking that party's gubernatorial nomination, but unless an explicitly "Ron Paul Republican" type candidate runs, it's hard to foresee the Republican Party producing anyone better. Certainly they've given us far worse in the past (e.g. Meg Whitman). But I can't imagine myself supporting Tim Donnelly over just about anyone the Libertarian Party is likely to run for governor.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))