Today, the American Freedom Law Center filed a “friend of the court” brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of Arizona’s immigration law. This case is shocking to the conscience and should concern all American citizens. The Obama administration refuses to enforce the existing laws prohibiting illegal immigration. And when a border State like Arizona decides that it must take action to protect its citizens from a clear and present threat to their physical safety and security, the Obama administration goes to court to stop it. One must seriously question the motives of a President who cares so little about the safety of the people in Arizona and our national security at large. Indeed, under the Obama administration, any notion of constitutionally mandated federalism is dead letter law. It is evident by Obama’s passing of the new healthcare mandate and now by challenging Arizona’s sovereign right as a State to exercise its police powers, that he seeks to expand his power and the power of the federal government overall, thereby effectively converting our Republic, designed as a federal system with a limited national government, into a single omnipresent national polity with absolute power to regulate all spheres of human existence. In short, Obama is taking us to the brink of a constitutional crisis.
In the brief filed today, AFLC Co-Founders and Senior Counsel David Yerushalm and Robert Muise argued, in part:
“While the Constitution grants Congress the authority ‘[t]o establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,’ this authority does not deprive the States of their right to exercise their police powers to protect their citizens from threats arising from within and without their physical borders. Moreover, these police powers were expressly reserved for the States by our Founding Fathers through the Tenth Amendment. Indeed, our Republic was designed as a federal system with a limited national government. As James Madison explained in the Federalist Papers: ‘In the first place it is to be remembered, that the general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws. Its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects. . . .’ Thus, far from depriving States their independent rights as sovereigns, the Constitution expressly preserves those rights in the States vis-à-vis the powers of the federal government. In fact, the States, and not the federal government, have the paramount right to exercise their police powers to provide for the physical protection and safety of persons within their respective borders. . . . S.B. 1070 was validly enacted pursuant to this authority.”
Read AFLC’s brief here.
Read more about the case here.