Arizona Leads U.S. in Real Immigration Reform

Bloomberg - One’s heart really has to go out to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. Last month, in one of the most high-profile cases heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in decades, the litigation position of his client -- the U.S. government under the administration of President Barack Obama -- forced Verrilli to argue on one day that the penalty imposed by the individual mandate provisions of the Affordable Care Act was not a tax that would deprive the court of jurisdiction under the Anti-Injunction Act, but argue the very next day that it was a tax for the purposes of determining Congress’s constitutional authority to adopt the act.The administration’s position also led him to argue on Day 2 that the individual mandate was a core part of the act, but on Day 3 that, if unconstitutional, the individual mandate could be severed from the rest of the statute because it was not a core part of the act. Then, last week, Verrilli’s client’s position compelled him to argue that the Obama administration’s unwritten policy of non-enforcement of federal immigration law prevented the states from helping to enforce those very same laws, because of the Supremacy Clause, which makes the Constitution and laws of the U.S. (not the policy preferences of a particular executive) the supreme law of the land. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, widely presumed to be an opponent of Arizona’s S.B. 1070 immigration law, had to tell the solicitor general that his argument was “not selling very well.” Read More News New Mexico

Arizona Leads U.S. in Real Immigration Reform