26 States Suing Obama To Stop Amnesty

by JASmius



Yay?:

“Texas is proud to lead a coalition that now includes a majority of the United States standing up against the President’s rogue actions,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. “The momentum against the President’s lawlessness continues to build with Tennessee and Nevada joining the effort to protect our states from the economic and public safety implications of illegal amnesty. As President Obama himself has said numerous times, he lacks the authority to impose amnesty. His actions represent a blatant case of overreach and clear abuse of power.”

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen already heard oral arguments in the case January 15th, where Texas argued that Obama’s amnesty would create a new wave of illegal immigration that would burden state governments. “This is the second time they’ve done it in two years,” Texas attorney Andrew Oldham told Hanen. “People, think: They’ve done it twice in two years. Maybe they’ll do it again in 2016.”

Obama lawyer Kathleen Hartnett disputed that claim, insisting that new arrivals will not come “on the expectation of receiving deferred action because they will be turned away.” “His policy only applies to people who have been here since 2012,” she said.

That's her argument?  That a stipulation of the capricious lawlessness of a dictator is a guide to what he may or may not illegally decree next?  I know that Miss Hartnett has a really lousy hand to play in this litigation, but can't she come up with anything better than that?

But then something similar can be said about Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin - well, that, and they're all run by Republican governors: They are laboring under the same mental handicap that continues to infuse and hamstring even the staunchest of conservative leaders and officeholders today: that the courts are their salvation and natural redoubt of recourse.  It's a kind of political passivity, really.  It is legislatures that are supposed to take action on issues, not judges; the judiciary was intended by the Founding Fathers to be the weakest of the three branches of government; that's why its enumerated powers are laid out in Article III of the U.S. Constitution.  It's why John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States, resigned to go run for governor of New York - because the SCOTUS, in his view, had too little power.  It's the same motivation that prompted one of his successors, John Marshall, to illegally seize more power for the courts under the label "judicial review" in Marbury v. Madison.  Of all the lawless usurpations perpetrated against the Founders' original intent, that was the first, and remains the most pervasive to this day.

But as a wise man once wrote, appealing to one branch of a government to counter the unlawful actions of another branch of that same government, which appoints members to the former branch, is akin to asking Bill Clinton to serve as the chaperone for a co-ed slumber party.  Okay, the author didn't express it quite the same way, but I trust the idea is sufficiently conveyed.  Sick Willie leading the chastity police is a garishly absurd proposition, and so is asking the federal courts to act against the federal president.  I mean, doesn't anybody remember the genesis of the term "judge-shopping"?  Hello?

Even more to the point, it presupposes that the States - the creators of the Constitution, and therefore, the federal government as well, never forget - have no legal power or authority to defy any action that comes out of Washington, D.C., lawful or unlawful.  And this gets back to the central tenet of any lawfully constituted representative republic: the rule of law.  Rule BY law, not by men.  If the rule of law is to mean anything, it has to mean that plainly illegal actions, like Barack Obama's "Immigration Proclamation" are not, by definition, valid or enforceable, and thus are, by that same definition, null and void.

Funny I should invoke that phrase, isn't it?  Because "null" is the root of the term "nullification," which holds that a state has the right to nullify, or invalidate, any federal law which is unconstitutional.  Put another way, neither the States, nor We, The People, cannot be legally required to obey an illegal law.  We can only be coerced through brute, extralegal power.  And that is the very essence of tyranny, is it not?

So lots of luck to Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.  Maybe their "coalition lawsuit" against Obamnesty will work.  Maybe it will accomplish what congressional Republicans have so far been unwilling to attempt - the slapping down with extreme prejudice of this most egregious Obama power grab to date.  But can we, or they, really count on it?  And should they even be bothering with that tactic when they have the constitutional power to directly nullify it themselves?  After all, that's what Obama is unlawfully doing to duly enacted U.S. immigration law, is it not?

Exit punchline from Wikipedia:

The theory of nullification has never been legally upheld by federal courts.

Fancy that.  Rather like my oddball disinclination to repeatedly slam my testicles in a drawer, isn't it?