Justice Scalia Rebukes Obama

The news of the day is that the Supreme Court struck down most of the Arizona law but upheld its most controversial provision, a ruling that made both sides happy and both sides frustrated.  The most interesting part of the lengthy ruling was Justice Scalia's scathing response.  He would have upheld the entire Arizona law and very effectively expressed solidarity with what the people of Arizona were trying to do in passing the law in the first place.  Here are some juicy quotes from his opinion (you can find the whole thing on SupremeCourt.gov):

The Government complains that state officials might not heed “federal priorities.” Indeed they might not, particularly if those priorities include willful blindness or deliberate inattention to the presence of removable aliens in Arizona. The State’s whole complaint—the reason this law was passed and this case has arisen—is that the citizens of Arizona believe federal priorities are too lax. The State has the sovereign power to protect its borders more rigorously if it wishes, absent any valid federal prohibition.  The Executive’s policy choice of lax federal enforcement does not constitute such a prohibition.

It has become clear that federal enforcement priorities—in the sense of priorities based on the need to allocate “scarce enforcement resources”—is not the problem here. After this case was argued and while it was under consideration, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced a program exempting from immi

gration enforcement some 1.4 million illegal immigrants 

under the age of 30.4  If an individual unlawfully present in the United States 

• came to the United States under the age of sixteen; 

• has continuously resided in the United States for at least five years . . . , 

• is currently in school, has graduated from high school, has obtained a general education 

veteran . . . ,  certificate, or is an honorably discharged 

• has not been convicted of a [serious crime]; and
• is not above the age of thirty,”5
then U. S. immigration officials have been directed to “defe[r] action” against such individual “for a period of two 

years, subject to renewal.”6

 The husbanding of scarce 

enforcement resources can hardly be the justification for 

this, since the considerable administrative cost of 

conducting as many as 1.4 million background checks, and ruling 

on the biennial requests for dispensation that the nonen­

forcement program envisions, will necessarily be deducted from immigration enforcement.  

The President said at a news conference that the new program is "the right thing to do" in light of Congress's failure to pass the Administration's proposed revision of the Immigration Act.7

Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so.  But to say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind.

The Court opinion's looming specter of unutterable 

horror

“[i]f §3 of the Arizona statute were valid, every State 

could give itself independent  authority to prosecute federal

 registration violations,” ante, at 10—seems to me not a

so horrible and even less looming.  But there has come to pass, and is with us today, the specter that Arizona and the States that support it prediction: 

 A Federal 

Government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws

 written, and leaves the States’ borders unprotected against immigrants whom those laws would exclude.  So the issue is a stark one.