Making good on a campaign promise, Assemblyman Tim Donnelly introduced an Arizona-style immigration law in the California Legislature yesterday.

Donnelly's bill would make it a crime to shelter an illegal immigrant, require employers to use E-Verify, and make it a state crime to “be present on public or private land while in violation of federal immigration laws.”

This will go exactly nowhere, but that's not the point.

The L.A. Weekly profiled Donnelly last month, sensing a star in the making on the anti-illegal immigration front. Good to see him living up to expectations so far.

On the same day he filed his first bill, Donnelly got his seating assignment on the Assembly floor. Looks like he'll be right next to Gil Cedillo, which suggests that both of them are being punished.

Cedillo said the things you have to say in that situation, telling the Sacramento Bee that Donnelly is a “lovely man” and a “man who is very sincere, a man of conviction and faith and a man committed to service to the state.”

Donnelly responded in kind, saying the pro-immigrant Assemblyman is “a real gentleman.” This is the same guy who once wrote that nearly every Latino politician in California is part of “the lobbying wing of Vicente Fox's government,” and who once accused the “open-borders, pro-Mexico lobby” of “treason.” So Cedillo is a gentleman, and a traitor.

Before he sings Donnelly's praises too much, Cedillo may want to check out some of the other things Donnelly used to write on the Internet. Such as:

The facts are incontrovertible that allowing an illegal invasion of the United States will destroy the American Southwest, and very probably wipe out the freedoms we American Christians enjoy, as Muslim Extremists blend in with the so-called 'innocent' illegal aliens, and eventually proselytize them.

Scary stuff. And then there's the bit about Mexicans “raping young girls, marrying extremely young girls, ogling women in an aggressive manner”… and so on.

But setting all that aside, yesterday was a good start on what should be an entertaining tenure.

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