Big, high-profile liberal states like California and New York grab most of the headlines and would appear to lay legitimate claim to the title of “Most Outrageous Liberal State.” With their inept governors and big-city mayors, rampant crime, embarrassing homelessness and über-woke public policies, CA and NY definitely deserve the negative attention they attract.

Massachusetts is more subtle. Sure, on a national level, we have the reputation for being “Taxachusetts” and everyone knows that John Kerry and the Kennedys are from here, but we don’t garner the adverse notoriety that CA and NY do. Instead of the humiliating blunders that incompetents like Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul, and Eric Adams commit daily, Massachusetts mostly skates under the national radar. We even have a supposed “Republican” governor, Charlie Baker, actually the softest, squishiest RINO of all RINOs, but to the other 49, he’s an “R,” so the rest of the country assumes – incorrectly -- that yeah, okay, Massachusetts is pretty liberal, but it’s not that bad.

Wrong.

Massachusetts is so corrupt and one-sided that Democrats here don’t even bother to hide their efforts at vote-rigging and partisan gamesmanship. The first tip-off is that every statewide election is called on election night at 8:03 p.m. and the vote is always within a point or two of 62-38% for the Democrat. Every protest to Secretary of State William Galvin goes unheeded and ignored. Galvin -- a lifelong political hack who has never held a productive job in the private sector -- has been Secretary of State since 1995, the second-longest tenure of any politician in Massachusetts’ history. The quaint notion of “election integrity” doesn’t appear on Galvin’s horizon.

The next thing to consider is the lopsided Democrat-Republican makeup of the State Legislature. The State House is 126-27 Democrat and the State Senate is 37-3 Democrat. Republicans can’t force a public roll call vote (Dems get to hide all their votes from the public record), nor can Republicans uphold a gubernatorial veto, on those exceedingly rare occasions when RINO Baker pretends to object to something rammed through by the Democrats. It’s truly a one-party state.

But what’s happening now in Massachusetts is beyond awful, even by MA standards. (And remember, this is the state that first legalized same-sex marriage.) The State Legislature -- bypassing the voting public altogether and easily overriding Governor Baker’s pathetic veto -- pushed through a new law authorizing driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. Their public line is, “It’ll improve public safety, since so many undocumented residents are driving now anyway. If they’re licensed, we can keep track of their driving and hold them accountable.”

That’s not the reason. In Massachusetts, as soon as a driver’s license is issued, the driver is automatically registered to vote and their name is sent to the respective town Registrar of Voters and added to the voter rolls. The only way to not be registered is for the licensee to proactively opt out of being registered. DMV personnel are hardly qualified (or motivated!) to check the validity of immigration documentation for illegals, so there is no way to prevent MA’s fraudulent voter ranks -- all these illegals will become Democratic voters, obviously -- from swelling to huge numbers, numbers that can’t ever be defeated at the polls.

Therefore, MA Republicans, spearheaded by Maureen Maloney (an angel mom whose son was killed by a drunk driving illegal in 2011), have begun a signature petition drive to get the issue of licenses for illegals on the State ballot in November 2022. Public opinion is actually against illegal driver’s licenses among the general public, not just among Republicans.

As is usually the case with signature drives, many of these are held in front of busy public spaces like supermarkets and retail shopping centers (with the full knowledge and permission of the stores’ managers). It’s a common sight here in MA.

However, this time, Democratic extremists are actively disrupting the signature collection efforts, verbally intimidating and berating would-be signatories (“Racist! Racist!” What else would you expect?) and in many cases actually physically preventing people from signing sheets, or even destroying sheets of signatures that had already been collected. This is not national news. It’s not being covered by the nightly cable news shows. To the rest of the country, Massachusetts is the same mostly liberal, high-tax but supposedly cosmopolitan state it’s always been. We’ve still got all those really good colleges, the world-class hospitals, great sports teams, and the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops orchestras. As I said, we come off to the other 49 with such sophistication.

Why the seemingly unusual vitriolic opposition to this initiative? Why this time? It’s not merely because giving drivers licenses to illegals is a sure-fire way to rig MA elections in the Democrats’ favor forever into the future. It’s bigger than that.

In November 2022, the MA race for governor is wide open. The Democrats’ candidate is Maura Healy (currently MA Attorney General). Healy is an anti-police, anti-law and order, pro-illegal immigration, pro-multiple gender, pro-CRT, pro-higher taxes, and is a pro-environmental fanatic of the highest order. She, of course, favors the licenses for illegals.

Her likely Republican opponent is former MA State Representative Geoff Diehl, a real conservative, but one with an agreeable, non-threatening persona. Diehl is good-looking, personally likeable and eminently electable. He is against the licenses for illegals. This is a clear-cut differentiator between the two candidates, completely apart from the usual Republican-Democrat policy differences. A huge number of both Independent and Democrat voters do not want to see illegals get a driver’s license. If this issue gets on the ballot and proves to be a vote-driver -- getting people to the polls who probably wouldn’t have voted otherwise -- then Diehl is the one who benefits from this greater voter participation. With the country in such an uproar about Biden’s inflation and overall failures, people have had it, even here in Massachusetts. If Diehl wins, Democrats fear that the MA electorate may come to realize that a real, common-sense Republican is actually good for their lives. A Diehl victory could signal a sea-change in MA politics. That’s the Democrats’ real fear.

As another famous Massachusetts politician (former Speaker Tip O’Neill) is credited with saying, “All politics is local.” The license-for-illegals is a huge local Massachusetts issue, virtually unknown outside of this state. Yet despite the putative “sophistication” of Massachusetts, the Democrats here are pulling out all the stops in a decidedly lowbrow demonstration of dirty politics of the worst kind.

Image: Jimmy Emerson, DVM