Politics
Out of context: Reply #12852
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If you think challenging the AZ law is some crazy idea, you should read these:
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/04…
It sounded to the Law Blog like we were heading toward a big federalism showdown. So we turned to Karl Manheim of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Irvine Law to pregame it for us. Their response: the law is DOA.
The Arizona law appears to be “facially unconstitutional,” Manheim said. “States have no power to pass immigration laws because it’s an attribute of foreign affairs. Just as states can’t have their own foreign policies or enter into treaties, they can’t have their own immigration laws either.”
States have long attempted to regulate immigration and in some instances the federal government successfully challenged state laws in court, including in the 1800s, Manheim said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/2…
Can Arizona’s controversial new immigration law — allowing the police to stop people and demand proof of citizenship — pass constitutional muster?
To many scholars, the answer is, simply, no.
“The law is clearly pre-empted by federal law under Supreme Court precedents,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, an expert in constitutional law and the dean of the University of California, Irvine, School of Law.
Since the 1800s, the federal government has been in charge of controlling immigration and enforcing those laws, Professor Chemerinsky noted. And that is why, he argued, Arizona’s effort to enforce its own laws is destined to fail.
But even some experts who say they are troubled by the law said it might survive challenges.
“My view of the constitutional question is that it is unconstitutional,” said Hiroshi Motomura, co-author of leading casebooks on immigration law and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. “But it’s a far cry from predicting empirically what a judge who actually gets this case will do.”
...So there you got the NYT and the WSJ, two of the most respected papers in the country, one considered center-left, the other center-right, but they both agree that even the most charitable interpretation is that the law is questionable. Given that, why would you be surprised for a second that the government plans to challenge it?
Do they see a political upside in terms of rallying Hispanics? Sure. Just like Republicans saw an upside in terms of rallying...well, you know. But that doesn't change the facts of the law. In fact, it's funny the Republicans are so dogmatic about say, the Civil Rights Act, but not about this.