After Martha’s Vineyard stunt, Newsom called DeSantis ‘America’s chief bully.’ He’s right

In sending a pair of unannounced planeloads of Venezuelan immigrants to Massachusetts’ Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis earned a prominent place in the increasingly crowded ranks of our most depraved politicians. His California counterpart and sometime nemesis, Gov. Gavin Newsom, aptly expressed the disgust every American should feel at DeSantis’ vile appeal to bigotry.

“This is nothing more than a stunt, but it’s done with intention — cruel intention to humiliate and dehumanize,” Newsom told McClatchy’s California editorial boards in an interview Thursday. “It’s disgraceful, it’s repugnant and, I would argue, it’s illegal.”

The California governor called for a federal investigation of the maneuver the day after Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said law enforcement officials there were looking into similar transports of migrants to Chicago. Both Democratic governors alluded to the possibility that the immigrants were transported against their will or under fraudulent pretenses, which does indeed warrant investigation.

Beyond the legal implications, Newsom added, “I think we’ve crossed the Rubicon of any decency.” He said DeSantis is “focused on demonizing and othering. He looks to vulnerable communities to exploit them purely for monetary and political purposes. He fund-raises off all of this.”

Newsom rightly called the Florida governor “America’s chief bully.”

Indeed, one of the most powerful politicians in one of the world’s wealthiest nations orchestrated this grotesque spectacle at the expense of the truly powerless, some of them children as young as 3. All were in desperate enough straits to leave their faraway homes and throw themselves on the mercy of Americans. In DeSantis’ case, there was no such mercy.

Previously seen berating some of Florida’s own children for wearing masks even as he let COVID run rampant across his state, DeSantis is in a race to somewhere underneath the bottom with other Republicans vying to succeed Donald Trump as our white supremacist in chief. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who had already bused thousands of migrants from the border to Democratic-run cities, ramped up his own demagoguery the day after DeSantis’ performance by shipping another group to Vice President Kamala Harris’ Washington, D.C., neighborhood.

A DeSantis spokeswoman disingenuously accused “states like Massachusetts, New York and California” of “incentivizing illegal immigration through their designation as ‘sanctuary states’ and support for the Biden administration’s open border policies.” In fact, the Biden administration has been all too slow to reverse his predecessor’s callous and arguably illegal rejection of most migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, a right appropriately protected by federal and international law.

Nor is there any evidence of a correlation between the number of border crossings and either the change in administrations or any sanctuary policies, which limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities in California and other jurisdictions. While encounters between migrants and border authorities reached a peak last fiscal year, there were nearly as many such encounters during previous surges under George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. And because a high proportion of recent encounters involve repeat crossing attempts, there were likely more migrants involved in the previous waves.

More than the vagaries of American policy and politics, immigration is being driven by the ravages of foreign wars, economic hardships and climate change — the sort of global realities that too much of the GOP prefers to ignore.

The party of Trump, Abbott and DeSantis would rather leverage the worst racist instincts of its supporters to distract from its self-inflicted wounds — from attempting to overturn a democratic election to successfully overturning women’s constitutional rights to control their own lives and bodies.

Newsom, who previously poked DeSantis with a Florida ad buy, stepped up his national campaign against Republicans this week with billboards touting California’s abortion rights in several GOP-controlled states.

Such proto-presidential politicking might be a vacation of sorts from grappling with homelessness, wildfires and other challenging aspects of his job in Sacramento. But Newsom has a record of compassion toward immigrants, having recently championed an extension of health coverage to the undocumented. And he has a point about the need for Democrats to be “more pointed” about Republican extremism.

“We need to call it out,” the governor said. “We need to be crystal clear (about) who they are (and) what they’re doing.”

Who they are, if there is hope for this country, can’t be who we are. Despite DeSantis’ amoral attempt to stoke hatred of Latino immigrants and the so-called liberal elites who summer on Martha’s Vineyard, the people of the island responded by feeding, clothing and sheltering what one of America’s best-known monuments to our ideals, the Statue of Liberty, calls the tired, the poor, the homeless and tempest-tossed. They responded, that is, the way Americans should.

This story was originally published September 16, 2022 at 5:00 AM.