Guest post by Sean Braisted
Former GOP Candidate for the State House in District 58, Jim Boyd, is at it again, this time running for Metro Council At Large. His campaign platform? You guessed it...those dirty, dirty "illegals".Adam Kleinheider at Volunteer Voters points us to Jim Boyd's first campaign commercial, which basically blames unauthorized immigrants for every social ill under the Sun.
Last year, during the run-up to the Democratic primary for the 58th seat, I had a lengthy discussion about his anti-immigration platform over at my blog Nashville for the 21st Century. Boyd essentially supported the people taking the law into their own hands:
You said "By law, the State can't deport people..." Yes Sean, we are a nation of laws. But in the United States of America, the law is NOT supreme! We The People are supreme because we dictate the law, not the other way around! And therein lies a basic flaw in your argument. The extreme Right and the extreme Left agree on some things. One of those things is that both sides want people to forget that in this country, PEPOLE control the law! They would rather have a weak, sheepish population that believes that the law is supreme and chiseled in stone, and they are powerless against it!
Boyd went on to say he supports dropping "illegals" off at the State border and letting other states deal with them. On his website he shows a picture of himself at the Mexico-US border proudly proclaiming "[m]ost of me is in the United States. My butt and my boot heels are in Mexico."
Voter apathy in local elections is a huge problem. While we must support quality candidates such as Fabian Bedne, we must also pay attention to the opposition. With a strong right-wing radio system in Nashville, there is always the potential for people like Boyd to get pushed into office, especially if there is low turnout.
Be sure and vote, or Jim Boyd, Jim Gotto, and others will be showing their butts to immigrants in Nashville for the next four years.