California has proclaimed itself a sanctuary state, in which public employees, including law enforcement, are directed to defy the nation’s immigration laws. At American Greatness, Michael Walsh writes that California Democrats have fired on Fort Sumter:

Now California Democrats—as radical a group of anti-Americans as you will find in this country, whether legal or “undocumented”—have again fired on Fort Sumter. And once again (don’t kid yourselves), the goal is de facto and, later, de jure, secession from the United States of America, as part of the Aztlan-inspired Reconquista of what Hispanic radicals consider lost territory.

Well, maybe. But before that happens, a serious confrontation with the federal government is possible. As Walsh notes, the acting director of I.C.E., Thomas Homan, is talking tough:

The acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says politicians who run sanctuary cities should be charged with crimes. Thomas Homan said in an interview Tuesday with Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto that the Department of Justice needs to file charges against municipalities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities and deny them funding. He also says politicians should be held “personally accountable” for crimes committed by people living in the U.S. illegally. Homan says, “We’ve got to start charging some of these politicians with crimes.”

It strikes me that victims of crimes by illegal aliens may also have good causes of action against state and local authorities. I don’t see how the usual immunities could apply, when local authorities are acting in violation of federal law. One way or another, I suspect that “sanctuary” status won’t play out as painlessly for California, and other jurisdictions, as they seem to expect.

One gets the feeling that California thinks it could get along quite well without the rest of us, but Michael Ramirez doesn’t see it that way. Click to enlarge:

A fundamental issue is in play here, and also with regard to various states’ acting in defiance of federal law by purporting to legalize marijuana. (Here, too, California is joining Colorado as a scofflaw state.) Before the Civil War, there was considerable ambiguity about the relationship between the states and the federal government under the Constitution. It was believed, in some quarters, that the states were, in the end, sovereign. The Civil War resolved that issue, for the next 150 years, in favor of federal supremacy. But now, states are again asserting the right to nullify federal law. Who ever thought that John C. Calhoun would emerge as a key political thinker of the 21st Century? I certainly didn’t, but that is exactly what has happened.

Apart from the specific issues of slavery, illegal immigration and drug use, on all of which the Democratic Party has been on the wrong side, there seems to be a strain of perversity in that party that the centuries have failed to eradicate.