DEBATE: Justice Scalia Goes After Obama in Ruling on Arizona Immigration Law
Justice Antonin Scalia, part of the right wing block of the Supreme Court, wrote in dissent that that he would have allowed the entire Arizona law to go forward, singling out the recent White House decision to block deportation of some young illegal immigrants.
Scalia wrote,” [T]here has come to pass, and is with us today, the specter that Arizona … predicted: A federal government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written, and leaves the States' borders unprotected … 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?"
Julian Epstein and Jay Sekulow weighed in on the statement during today’s America Live.
Sekulow said he thinks that Arizona is in a difficult spot, because “you’ve got portions of the law that were deemed preempted, the guts of the law, the big provision that was the controversial provision too, is held Constitutional … now immigrants have been told by the president for certain age groups, ‘don’t enforce the law,’ so this has put the states in the worst possible place where even the laws that the Supreme Court in today’s opinion said were Constitutional and could be implemented could have absolutely no effect for certain age groups. No wonder Justice Scalia was upset.”
“The Arizona law was intended to create a state criminalization of a lack of immigration status and the court absolutely shot that down,” Epstein said. “This was a slap down by the court on the Arizona statute.”
Sekulow agreed it was a slap down by the Court, and said, “The question today is does the Supreme Court’s decision boot strap the state of Arizona? It’s not just Arizona that’s boot-strapped here, Megyn; it’s any state that’s trying to protect its citizens.”
He added, “The states are in an awful hard place.”
