“The Obama administration’s lawsuit against the state of Arizona offers a revealing window into the Holder Justice Department. And the picture isn’t pretty, ” writes Kris W. Kobach.
Consider what we learned when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first let the cat out of the bag and told us about it during an interview in Ecuador. Clinton showed who was sitting in the driver’s seat when it came to the Justice Department’s decision: “President Obama has spoken out against the law because he thinks that the federal government should be determining immigration policy. And the Justice Department, under his direction, will be bringing a lawsuit against the act.”
The key words here are “under his direction.” In other words, the White House is calling the shots. The same political calculations that drove Obama to criticize the Arizona law in April also drove the filing of the suit. While that is fine for policy decisions in other executive departments, the litigation decisions of the Justice Department are different. Past administrations — both Republican and Democratic — have taken care to insulate these decisions from political forces.
The reasons for doing so are obvious.
The decision to file civil charges or to file a civil lawsuit should be based purely on the strength of the legal case against the defendant, not on politics. And when it comes to the Arizona law, the federal government’s case is a weak one.
“When one considers the Arizona lawsuit in contrast to last year’s Justice Department decision to drop the voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, the conclusion becomes inescapable. In the Black Panther case, the defendants had failed to answer the charges against them, and all the Department had to do was ask the judge for a default judgment. But the political appointees of the Holder Justice Department came in and ordered the career department attorneys to drop the case.
So the department dropped a slam-dunk case and yet files a suit that is half-court shot. Neither decision makes sense if the law is guiding the department’s litigation decisions. But both decisions make perfect sense if political calculations are foremost.”
[SNIP]
I’m appalled that other states have not stood up loudly for Jan Brewer who, while not the sharpest knife in the draw, is at least sharp enough to understand the importance of defending Arizonans against trespass, from within (the feds) and without (alien scofflaws and welfare consumers).
Has anyone heard what the Republican beauty queen Sarah Palin has to say about the Federal government’s frontal attack on Arizona? Where is Bachmann on the matter? Are republicans covering up for the terrible two’s relative silence on the topic?
