Contributor

Ray Haynes

Mr. Haynes is an Assembly member representing Riverside and Temecula. He serves on the Appropriations and Budget Committees. [go to Assembly Member Haynes website at California Assembly]

Moral Dyslexia?
The insanity in Sacramento is on the rise.
by Assemblyman Ray Haynes [posted 4/30/03] 4/25/03

I try to look at my job with a sense of humor, I really do. Everything is just more pleasant if you can laugh at what is happening around you. There are occasionally times when what happens is so outrageous and that humor is simply the wrong response. Quite frankly, right now I’m pretty ticked off.

This week, in the Assembly Higher Education Committee, two bills came up for a vote. Assemblyman Maddox had a bill (AB 307) to help our young men and women serving in the National Guard qualify for Cal Grants, a scholarship granted by the state to those Californians who need financial help to attend college in this state. The other bill was introduced by Assemblyman Calderon (AB 153) that gave that same opportunity to qualify for Cal Grants to those who have entered our country illegally.

The rationale for the Maddox bill was simple. Many of those in the National Guard are called out to serve on a moment’s notice. Some of those are in colleges, and, if they are called up for an extended period of time and cannot finish their classes, they lose the credits at the college, and the tuition they paid. By giving National Guard volunteers Cal Grant consideration, the state would remove the punishment caused by their service.

The rationale for an illegal getting the tuition payment from the taxpayers of this state is that they deserve to be treated like a citizen of this state when it comes to state benefits. According to those who think that this is a good idea, they shouldn’t be excluded just because they broke the laws of this country.

The Assembly Higher Education Committee approved the bill giving benefits to illegals, and killed the bill which would have helped out our National Guard volunteers. I belive the majority in the Assembly has developed a chronic case of moral dyslexia – they are regularly mixing up right and wrong and reversing their YES and NO buttons.

Right now we are in a financial crisis of monumental proportions with a $30+ billion deficit. So I can understand using that as a reason to kill these bills. This is probably not the best time to be expanding state benefits to anyone, even if they have sacrificed their time and their money for you and me. The Democrats on the committee basically used that as the excuse to render AB 307 a useless tool for our National Guard volunteers (they didn’t kill the bill, they just gutted it, over the objection of the author, and passed it out of the committee while he was out of the room). If the committee had then killed the illegal alien bill, I would have thought that at least they were trying to save us money.

But they didn’t kill the illegal alien tuition bill, they passed it. They essentially gave illegal aliens in this state a tuition break at the colleges in this state, and denied that same benefit to our National Guard volunteers. It’s Outrageous. Absolutely outrageous.

This type of insanity is happening more and more often here in Sacramento. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Republicans fought for two weeks behind the scenes, and two and a half hours on the floor just to get a resolution supporting our troops in Iraq. With that no sooner behind us, than the Democrats put a resolution on the floor basically attacking the Boy Scouts because they don’t allow homosexual scout leaders.

They clearly are having problems discerning right from wrong. Their moral dyslexia is aided by the fact that their total control of the legislative process allows them to get away with regularly being wrong. They are absolutely brazen about it, probably because they think you will never find out, since the press will certainly never cover it.

They may be right. The press didn’t cover this outrage, and the Democrats have yet to pay a price at the polls for their brazen tactics. This will keep happening until they do.