First off, your justiceship, the State of Arizona is not the property of the people who live there. They can’t sue you for trespassing because you walk on the sidewalk. As for “straining social services,” illegal immigrants can’t get food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid, or Medicare-funded hospitalization. They can get emergency medical care and K-12 education. They work a lot, and they pay taxes. They don’t commit crimes very often, and they don’t kill people, Arizona governor Jan “severed heads in the desert” Brewer to the contrary notwithstanding.
Scalia compounded his ignominy by going out of his way to attack President Obama’s recent executive order halting deportation of illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, pretending that it was somehow before the Court, which it was not. “[T]here has come to pass,” he writes, with oracular rage, “and is with us today, the specter that Arizona and the States that support it predicted: A Federal Government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written, and leaves the States’ borders unprotected against immigrants whom those laws would exclude. So the issue is a stark one. Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the Federal Executive’s refusal to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws?
Since it’s up to the “Federal Executive,” aka the President of the United States, who these days happens to be President Barack Obama, to enforce the laws of the United States, one would feel inclined to say “Yeah, Nino, that’s exactly how it is.”
Nino, naturally, has other ideas: “A good way of answering that question is to ask: Would the States conceivably have entered into the Union if the Constitution itself contained the Court’s holding? Today’s judgment surely fails that test.”
Well, excuse me, dude, but what sort of “test” is that? Your job is to enforce the Constitution and laws of the United States, not to guess whether the Constitution would have been approved if it hadn’t been written the way it was in fact written, a “test” that, in my opinion, would allow for enough bunnies in the hat* to keep an infinity of magicians employed until the end of time.
Well, guess away, Nino. My guess is that tomorrow, you’ll be voting to overturn the Obama Administration’s Affordable Care Act, and my hope is that you’ll be expressing your opinion in another smokin’ dissent. You asshole.
Afterwords
Over at Salon, Paul Campos elegantly dissects Scalia’s folly, as does Nathan Pippenger here for the New Republic.
Update: Over at “Hot Air,” Ed Morrissey points out that Scalia, by loudly denouncing the Obama Administration’s new policy of selective enforcement of the immigration laws, has (obviously) taken a “a public stance on a public-policy issue that has at least a decent chance of becoming part of a court fight. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and others have already threatened to take Obama to court over the imposition of the DREAM act by executive fiat. Thanks to this public outburst, Scalia has put himself in position for a recusal, since it’s pretty clear that he has a built-in bias on the specific issue. It may have felt satisfying, but in the end the blast will do more damage than good.”
“More damage than good,” huh? That’s Scalia in a very small, and a very understated, nutshell.†
*”Putting the bunny in the hat” is lawyer slang for stating an issue so that the desired conclusion is contained in the premise.
†Occasionally, both Scalia and Clarence Thomas have shown more allegiance to civil liberties than the so-called liberals on the court, and for that they deserve to be commended.
