A leftover from yesterday. “Drunk-driving shouldn’t be deportable” sounds like a winning message for the 2020 Democratic nominee to me.

Certainly, the Trump campaign wouldn’t respond to that by having POTUS appear at an event alongside various parents whose children were mangled or killed by illegal-immigrant drunk drivers.

Menendez’s supporters have a counter to that: Driving under the influence is actually not a criminal offense in his home state of New Jersey. It’s a traffic offense. You can be jailed for it (briefly) and fined but technically it doesn’t even qualify as a misdemeanor. To which I say, so what? It’s a misdemeanor in other states, including next door in New York. Noting that federal policy conflicts with New Jersey policy doesn’t settle the question of which is right, it raises the question of which is right. What view should the feds take of someone who (a) has no legal right to be here and (b) constitutes a public menace by operating a machine while impaired that’s capable of killing people? The question answers itself.

What you’re seeing here with Menendez is the left’s actual view of illegal immigration laid bare: Only violent criminals should be deported, and what constitutes “violent” is as narrow as they can make it. Voluntarily assuming the foreseeable risk that you’ll run someone down by driving drunk isn’t what they mean by “violent.” Nor, I’d bet, is simple assault. Only the worst of the worst have to go in an ideal Democratic universe. And the most annoying part is that they won’t defend that argument on the merits. What they do, as Menendez does here, is frame it in terms of resources. “We only have so much deportation capacity. We must prioritize.” Yes, but that would be more persuasive if Democrats hadn’t just spent five weeks in a staring contest with Trump to deny him funding for a barrier that would reduce illegal border-crossings. It ain’t the right that’s limiting federal resources on immigration enforcement. If Menendez is worried about the feds not prioritizing properly in deporting illegals, pony up so that they don’t have to pick and choose as much.

Speaking of drunk-driving, enjoy Beto O’Rourke in the second clip below warning liberals at his rally last night in El Paso that walls kill. I’ve addressed that argument before but not as succinctly as Dan McLaughlin: “Replace ‘walls’ with ‘laws’ without changing the meaning.”

Here's Beto saying "walls do not save lives. Walls end lives" because it forces people who are illegally crossing to go to more remote places on the border. pic.twitter.com/2UssUuCtFj

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) February 12, 2019