I'm not finding Tim Cavanaugh's defense of Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Meg Whitman's nannygate very persuasive:
You might make the case that Whitman should have confronted Diaz and said, "Hey Nicky, we need to sign a form and send it to Attorney General Reno proving that you're in this country legally and able to work -- and I know you've already affirmed both of those things in your application [pdf] with the employment agency, but hey, let's just be on the safe side," because of course, any time you hire a person with a Spanish-sounding name you should pry into that person's immigration status. But that's not the America most of us want to live in, and it's certainly not the California anybody would be able to live in.
The problem is that it is the America Meg Whitman wants to live in, and the California she hopes to govern. A self-styled border hawk opposed to a path to citizenship who is either too indifferent or too lazy to comply with laws she wants to make stricter isn't an "enemy of bureaucratic red tape" anymore than people who forget to pay their parking tickets. If that were true, every car owner in America would be a libertarian.
