A rough ruling for immigration hard-liners
By Dana Milbank, WashPost, Published: June 25
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is many things — immigration provocateur, bete noire of Latinos, presidential irritant — but nobody has ever accused her of being a legal scholar.
On Monday morning, the Supreme Court struck down three of four contested provisions in her state’s immigration law and left the fourth in jeopardy. But Brewer decided to call it a win.
“Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court is a victory for the rule of law,” the Republican governor announced in a statement that left the strong impression it was written before the opinion was released. She used the word “victory” twice more in her written statement, and added the word “vindicated” to her oral remarks.
To be sure, the ruling left intact part of the immigration crackdown, the “show me your papers” component, which the court suggested might be vulnerable to future challenge. But Brewer certainly couldn’t have called it a victory if she had read the vitriolic dissent of Justice Antonin Scalia against the opinion by a union of the court’s liberal bloc with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
In an extraordinary display of judicial distemper, Scalia departed entirely from the law at one point and attacked an Obama administration policy that wasn’t at issue in the case. Footnoting a New York Times news article rather than case law, Scalia opined on a recent news conference by President Obama.
(More here.)
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is many things — immigration provocateur, bete noire of Latinos, presidential irritant — but nobody has ever accused her of being a legal scholar.
On Monday morning, the Supreme Court struck down three of four contested provisions in her state’s immigration law and left the fourth in jeopardy. But Brewer decided to call it a win.
“Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court is a victory for the rule of law,” the Republican governor announced in a statement that left the strong impression it was written before the opinion was released. She used the word “victory” twice more in her written statement, and added the word “vindicated” to her oral remarks.
To be sure, the ruling left intact part of the immigration crackdown, the “show me your papers” component, which the court suggested might be vulnerable to future challenge. But Brewer certainly couldn’t have called it a victory if she had read the vitriolic dissent of Justice Antonin Scalia against the opinion by a union of the court’s liberal bloc with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
In an extraordinary display of judicial distemper, Scalia departed entirely from the law at one point and attacked an Obama administration policy that wasn’t at issue in the case. Footnoting a New York Times news article rather than case law, Scalia opined on a recent news conference by President Obama.
(More here.)
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