Apoplectic Over Legal Reversals On Race

Constitution, Law, Race, Racism, States' Rights, The State

Any weakening of laws that privilege protected groups will be decried by … the groups the law protects and others vested in “advancement through affirmative action, quotas, contract set-asides based on race” and race-based redistricting. The latter is “the intentional formation of majority–minority districts (districts in which voters of color constitute a majority of eligible voters).

Supreme Court setbacks to the racial spoils-system run by federal and state enforces is bound to annoy the system’s beneficiaries and supporters. In this, The National Law Journal stands firmly with “Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.” The former called a Tuesday decision over “a key provision of the Voting Rights Act by the U.S. Supreme Court” a “gutting” of the law. The latter decried this legal reprieve as “a serious and unnecessary setback,” promising that “the department will press on in the enforcement of voting rights laws.”

Basically the South was declared to no longer pose a danger to blacks. Read The National Law Journal’s laughable lamentations:

A divided U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday dealt a crippling blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by striking down the formula devised by Congress to determine which states are covered by the act.
“In 1965, the States could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the Nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.”
By invalidating the coverage formula in Section 4(b) of the act, the court, in effect, rendered Section 5—the heart of the act—useless. Section 5 requires covered jurisdictions—those with a history of voting discrimination—to submit any changes in their voting practices for preclearance by the Department of Justice or the federal district court in Washington. …

MORE.

UPDAED: Rand Paul’s Reversal On Oink-Filled Immigration Omnibus

IMMIGRATION, Law, Republicans, Welfare

Rand Paul strikes more political poses than a practitioner of tantric sex.

In March this year, he joined the Gang of Eight (Gof8) with his own goof-proof “case” for amnesty. It was that “de facto amnesty” must give way to amnesty de jure. In other words, Rand’s non sequitur was that, given reality on the ground, legislators must take action to turn it into a legal reality.

The one condition doesn’t necessarily follow from the other. Since when are legislators obligated to legislate over every reality that forms on the ground?

Two days ago, Rand told CNN’s chief political correspondent Candy Crowley that, “Without some congressional authority and without border security first, I can’t support the final bill.”

I suspect Rand Paul “heard” a thing or two from his constituents. The omnibus immigration bill is a pork-filled power grab of a bill, if ever there was one. (Aren’t they all? A pork-filled power grab is the definition of legislation.) It is “headed toward bipartisan passage in the U.S. Senate, but is going nowhere from there.

UPDATED (6/27): The Heritage Foundation on the “Expansion of Government Bureaucracy” that is the Oink-Filled Immigration Omnibus, which passed today with Republican support in the Senate:

In addition to creating an open season on government spending, the provisions within S. 744 would also substantially expand government bureaucracy. The bill creates several new offices, task forces, and commissions including the:

Southern Border Security Commission, composed largely of appointed members and charged with making recommendations to achieve effective control along the border;[31]
Department of Homeland Security Border Oversight Task Force, composed of members appointed by the executive and charged with providing review and recommendations on government immigration and border enforcement policies and programs, and their specific impact on border communities;[32]
Task Force on New Americans, composed largely of Cabinet members and created to establish coordinated federal policies and programs to promote assimilation.[33]
Joint Employment Fraud Task Force, created to investigate compliance with immigration employment verification requirements;[34] and
Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research, charged with analyzing labor shortages, developing methodologies for determining the annual cap for the newly created employment-based W visa, and help employers to recruit W visa holders.[35]

Even where the bill does not explicitly create new government agencies and offices, it is likely to expand government bureaucracy. For one, the amnesty provisions contained within S. 744 would create a flood of applications to be processed by USCIS, an agency that is already struggling to keep up. Yet, instead of providing much-needed reforms to USCIS that would create a healthier and more responsive agency, an issue that is not addressed within the bill, the likely response will be to simply throw more money and manpower at the problem.[36] The same response is likely to be true for the Internal Revenue Service, which may require more personnel to enforce the bill’s requirement that amnesty applicants satisfy applicable federal tax liability.

Additional provisions also establish burdensome government regulations and fees that promise to have a direct effect on business, including the setting of mandatory wages for nonimmigrant agricultural workers and pro-union provisions restricting agriculture employers’ ability to hire needed workers.[37] The bill also established numerous fees to be paid by employers seeking foreign labor, which add to business costs and ultimately fund many of the bill’s other misguided priorities.[38] Such regulations and fees will only serve to burden business, raise costs, and decrease the incentive for employers to create new jobs.

UPDATED: Where Are Tenth-Amendment Advocates On Senate Amnesty Bill?

Conservatism, Constitution, Federalism, IMMIGRATION, Republicans, States' Rights

In “Democracy And The Immigration Political Steamroller,” I inquired after the Tenth-Amendment Center. Why was it AWOL in the current amnesty fiasco?

To its credit, The Heritage Foundation has not gone along with the open-border crowd, and has made some sharp points about the top-down federal approach that characterizes the Senate’s “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act”:

8. Disregard for Federalism

The Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution clearly articulates that powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government are thereby reserved to the states.[46] The Founders understood that in order to know what is truly necessary and prudent for the protection of citizens’ rights and liberties, one must be in constant interaction with the people. For this reason, the Founders felt that states fostered the best-equipped individuals to represent the interests of public safety on behalf of their own citizens.

States also have a unique familiarity with their communities that enables them to better navigate the difficult issues of detection, detention, and deportation of illegal aliens. Following this same rationale, many legal experts believe that state and local governments retain inherent authority to enforce federal civil law. Opponents to this practice, however, feel the federal government should be the controlling voice when determining immigration policies and border security, with little to no guidance from the states themselves. As was the case with Arizona’s S. B. 1070 immigration law, when the state attempted to implement requirements it felt necessary to determine the immigration status of an individual, the federal government saw the state as an obstacle rather than an ally.[47]

Yet, with fewer than 6,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, failing to use the one million state and local law enforcement personnel to supplement federal personnel makes little sense. State and local law enforcement would, in fact, be a powerful force multiplier for immigration law enforcement. Yet, S. 744 continues to promote a top-down federal approach to addressing immigration while leaving minimum room for real collaboration.[48]

The bill does include a select few instances where some form of collaboration presents itself between the state, local, and federal governments. For example, four of 10 appointed members to the Southern Border Security Commission are to be representatives of the four states along the southern border. One representative is to come from each of the states and be either the governor or someone appointed by the governor.[49] Also, with approval from the Secretary of Defense, a governor may order personnel of the National Guard of his or her own state to perform operations and missions in the southwest border region for the purposes of assisting U.S. Customs and Border Protection.[50] These instances, however, are very limited.
State and local law enforcement would be a powerful force multiplier for immigration law enforcement. Yet, the Senate bill promotes a federal top-down approach to addressing immigration, leaving minimum room for real collaboration.

Otherwise, the bill provides no clear proposal for partnerships between the federal and state or local governments. Indeed, the legislation makes no mention of effective collaborative immigration enforcement programs, such as Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the federal government to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement to “act in the stead of ICE agents by processing illegal aliens for removal.”[51]Instead, it pushes a federal-government-knows-best-and-will-fix-all mentality.

Read Heritage’s 9 other points.

Advocates of the Tenth and states’ rights are clearly AWOL.

UPDATE: Jack Kerwick isn’t. He’s out there wrestling with the illogic of the concepts immigration fetishists deploy to beat you about the head. “Toward an Honest Discussion of Immigration”: Read it!

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Democracy And The Immigration Political Steamroller

Constitution, Democracy, Elections, Federalism, Government, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, States' Rights

The essence of democracy is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will,” a “national purpose” that must be implemented by an all-powerful state. “Democratic voting is done, not only to select officials but also to determine the functions and goals and powers of the government,” writes legal scholar (and friend) James Ostrowski. “The guiding principle of republics is that they exercise narrow powers delegated to them by the people, who themselves, as individuals, possess such powers.”

James Madison was not a democrat. He denounced popular rule as “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” Democracy, he observed, must be confined to a “small spot” (like Athens). Madison and the other founders attempted to forestall democracy by devising a republic, the hallmark of which was the preservation of individual liberty. To that end, they restricted the federal government to a handful of enumerated powers.

Decentralization, devolution of authority, and the restrictions on government imposed by a Bill of Rights were to ensure that few issues were left to the adjudication of a national majority.

When you consider every bit of legislation written by our democratically elected despotic lawmakers—the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S.744),” for example—contemplate the words of Benjamin Barber:

It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends. Politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians.

And where, pray tell, in the immigration tyranny is the Tenth-Amendment Center? Its scholars used to advocate for the right of the residents of the states to determine how they lived their lives. Unless I am doing him a disservice—in which case I apologize profusely—the last time Michael Boldin applied the Tenth Amendment creatively to the political steamroller that is immigration was when he distinguished between immigration and naturalization in 18th century nomenclature, back in … April 28, 2010.

Has the Tenth Amendment Center fallen to the Beltway bigwigs of the Cato Institute?

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