Justice Scalia in Arizona v. United States Finally Exposes His True Belief of the Role of the Supreme Court

He Thinks the Supreme Court in General and Justice Scalia in Particular Should Act as Both the President and the Congress

The Supreme Court has just ruled on whether or not the state of Arizona may essentially withdraw from the United States as far as immigration is concerned and enact its own policy regardless of the fact that Federal law pre-empts state law in this situation.  It has ruled, to a great extent that it may not.  The law that Mitt Romney called ‘model’ for the United States is invalid.

In his dissent Justice Scalia reveals that he thinks he is the arbiter not of the laws but of governmental policy.  He brings a totally irrelevant issue into the debate, and issue that was not then and is not now part of the case.  He can do that because he is answerable to no one, not even the law.  His issue is with the President’s recent policy to acknowledge that law enforcement resources are insufficient to track down and deport every illegal immigrant, and so law enforcement will concentrate on the dangerous and criminal illegals, and leave those who were brought to this country as children and have led exemplary lives, alone.

You know, ‘Scalia’, that’s a funny sounding name.  Don’t we all wonder if maybe Scalia is the name of an illegal immigrant?  Wouldn’t it be right under Arizona’s now defunct law for Arizona police to stop Justice Scalia, demand to see his ‘papers’ and make him prove he is a U. S. citizen?  If anyone ever wonders what it would take for their to be unequivocal proof that a higher Deity rules the world, certainly the arrest of Justice Scalia for sounding and looking foreign and having a foreign name  would meet that criteria.

Here is what offends Justice Scalia (actually almost everyone and everything offends Justice Scalia).

Must Arizona’s ability to protect its borders yield to the reality that Congress has provided inadequate funding for federal enforcement—or, even worse, to the Executive’s unwise targeting of that funding?

Really, what possible justification does this Justice have for passing judgment on executive law enforcement policy when that policy is totally outside of the issues in the decision? (Courts can only consider what is brought before them, but that is a legal technicality the Justice seems to be unaware of.) But Justice Scalia goes even further, he asserts that he knows better than the elected officials and the appointed law enforcement officials of how to best and most effectively spend public money.

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 nonenforcement 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.

No Justice Scalia, what boggles the mind is the level of arrogance that you have accumulated over the years, arrogance that manifests itself in trying to write your own personal political opinions into law.  It seems almost impossible that any attorney, much less one that has actually been a judge should be so ignorant of the role of courts in the U. S. legal and Constitutional framework.  But it must be possible, for we have Justice Scalia as living proof that such ignorance can exist.

History will not be kind to Justice Scalia, the indictment coming from the Justice and his own writings.