In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day this week, every liberal made the totally original point that anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis are walking in King’s footsteps! King protested — and they’re protesting. See? Same thing.

In any liberal morality play, Democrats always get to be the shivering, oppressed black people, while Republicans have to play the part Bull Connor, Birmingham, Ala.‘s racist commissioner of public safety.

Except the facts are exactly the opposite. I’m sure you’re bored of hearing this, but Connor was a Democrat, as were all the politicians promising “massive resistance” to racial integration. Republicans were the ones forcing Democrats to abide by federal law, along with a few John Fetterman-style Democrats.

But the biggest fraud the media are trying to push on America is their total erasure of the most heroic actions ever taken by U.S. presidents: Invoking the Insurrection Act and sending troops to the states to enforce federal law against protesting Democratic governors and individual citizens.

Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, then John F. Kennedy, deployed the military to compel Democrats to stop violating federal law — as set forth in the Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. In that case, the court found — for the first time — that the education of black and white children in “separate but equal” public schools violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

You want an “insurrection”? The constitutional rights of nine black people in Arkansas were being violated! More precisely, the rights of all 400,000 black Arkansans were being violated.

Today, the rights of all 340 million Americans to live in a law-based constitutional republic are being violated, and at least 77 million are ticked off about it.

Eisenhower didn’t wait for federal agents to be hospitalized, hit with shovels, injured with projectiles, their vehicles vandalized, and streets blocked for weeks on end to send in federal troops. State officials and private citizens were acting as if federal law didn’t apply to them. That was enough.

Eisenhower explained that “[c]ertain misguided persons, have insisted upon defying the law,” and unless the president intervened, “anarchy will result.” The “interest of the nation in the proper fulfillment of the law’s requirements cannot yield to opposition and demonstrations by some few persons.”

First, Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard, taking it out of an insubordinate governor’s hands, with instructions to enforce the ruling in Brown. Then he invoked his authority under the Constitution and the Insurrection Act to command all those impeding enforcement of the law to cease, desist, and disperse.

They did not, so the very next day, Eisenhower sent 1,000 soldiers with the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to walk nine black children to school. They stayed there for the entire 1957-1958 school year, ensuring continued compliance with federal law. Five years later, JFK did the same thing, federalizing the National Guard, whereupon they escorted two black students into the University of Alabama and 20 black students into Birmingham public schools.

Eisenhower and Kennedy were enforcing a single Supreme Court ruling — one, I might add, with a dubious conclusion, inasmuch as the real problem was that the schools were not remotely “equal,” not that black children need to sit next to white children in order to learn — a point made frequently and with some exasperation by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Still, the Court had ruled: Separate but equal violates the Constitution.

Any of this lighting up the “analogy” neurotransmitters in your brain? Just as Little Rock was the crucible for Democrats’ massive resistance to federal civil rights laws, Minneapolis has become the crucible for the Democrats’ massive resistance to federal immigration laws.

Govs. George Wallace (D-Ala.) and Orval Faubus (D-Ark. — and Bill Clinton mentor!) thought they could declare their states sanctuaries — or “islands,” if you will— from federal law. They seemed to believe they were entitled to their own interpretation of federal (civil rights) laws, while, today, Democratic governors are under the misapprehension that they are entitled to their own interpretation of federal (immigration) laws.

Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), fresh from overseeing a fraud scheme by Somali immigrants that stole $9 billion from U.S. taxpayers, has repeatedly referred to his state as an “island,” separate and apart from the federal immigration law.

Say, has the Supreme Court ever said anything about the states’ role in immigration? Why, yes it has! They have no role. None whatsoever. States are not even permitted to pass laws that comply with federal immigration law — that is, if the president is a Democrat and prefers not to enforce federal immigration law.

This, the court has made blindingly clear, not in one ruling, but in dozens, e.g., Toll v. Moreno, 458 U. S. 1 (1979); INS. v. Aguirre-Aguirre (1999); Miller v. Albright (1998); United States v. Valenzuela-Bernal (1982); Gonzales v. Reno (11th Cir. 2000); Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB (2002); Arizona v. United States (2012).

In 2010, Arizona passed a state law — not a bellicose statement from a showboating mayor, but an actual law — directing state law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration law, not defy it. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama preferred to not enforce the law.

Democrats screamed from the rooftops that Arizona’s law was an “assault on the domain of the federal government” — in the words of Sen. Chuck Schumer. The Obama administration took the case to the Supreme Court, citing the majestic “Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution,” and the fact that, “the federal government has preeminent authority to regulate immigration matters.”

The Supreme Court mostly agreed, striking down the entire law — except the provision that liberals had been most hysterical about, the so-called “Papers Please!” law. (Pause to note that liberals are always wrong about everything.)

The idea that states, much less individual citizens, are free to ignore federal immigration law is preposterous. This isn’t a close case.

We don’t need 177,000 troops in Germany, Spain, Belgium, Turkey, Guam, Bahrain, etc., etc. etc. (Wow, that is so not making America great again!) If Trump wants to be remembered by history as one of our greatest presidents, he should follow Eisenhower and JFK’s lead: Bring the troops home and send them to every sanctuary state in the union.

COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER