BREAKING: SCOTUS grants cert on S.B. 1070

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued its list of orders this morning and had granted certiorari for the petition for review in Arizona v. United States, in which the state has asked the Court to review the Ninth Circuit’s decision blocking enforcement of four provisions of S.B. 1070, its controversial immigration law.  The Los Angeles Times, UPI, the Associated Press (via the Washington Post), and the International Business Times all have preview coverage. 

NOTE: Jusice Elena Kagan has recused herself from this case due to her previous role as Solicitor General of the United States. The case will be heard and decided by only eight Justices.

UPDATE: "[T]he Justices on Monday took on the searing constitutional — and political — controversy over state power to strictly limit the way undocumented immigrants live their lives in the U.S.   Along with the politics-saturated but deeply consequential constitutional disputes over the new federal health care law and the role of federal courts in drawing up new election districts to protect minority voters’ rights, the Term that will run through late June is assured of being one of the Court’s most significant single years ever." Another landmark ruling in the offing : SCOTUSblog:

The Arizona case puts before eight of the Justices — former U.S. Solicitor General and now Justice Elena Kagan will not take part — that state’s highly controversial bill, known popularly as “S.B. 1070.”  That measure set a pattern among a number of states that have been growing increasingly impatient with what they consider to be the federal government’s lax enforcement of immigration controls, and the resulting harm that they believe illegal immigrants are doing to the quality of life for their citizens and legal residents.  The Arizona measure, and one in Alabama that goes even further, were passed by state legislatures with the specific intent of making life so difficult for undocumented aliens that they would choose to leave the state.  Other states are also passing similar measures.

Arizona’s governor, Janice Brewer, in taking the fate of S.B. 1070 on to the Supreme Court, is portraying the case as a major test of the sovereignty of the states to make their own social policies under traditional “police power” principles.  The federal government, which tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Court not to get involved in the case at this point, is treating the case as a test of whether states may adopt their own immigration policies that frustrate specific goals of federal policy.

With Justice Kagan not taking part, presumably because she had something to do with the issue in her former role in the Obama Administration Justice Department, there is the possibility that the eight participating Justices will wind up split 4-4 in the case.   That would have the effect of simply upholding a Ninth Circuit Court decision, but without opinion and without setting a nationwide precedent.  The practical effect of that would be that Arizona could not enforce four key provisions of S.B. 1070, blocked by both the Ninth Circuit and, earlier, by a federal District judge in Arizona.

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In urging Supreme Court review, the state’s petition (Arizona v. United States, docket 11-182) contended that the bar to enforcement of those provisions “casts constitutional doubt on dozens of statutes enacted by other states.”  The petition sought to persuade the Justices that the state was making only modest efforts to join in cooperation with the federal government to enforce existing policy against illegal immigration.   The Obama Administration urged the Court to deny review, arguing that it was premature for the Court to get involved before other federal appeals courts have ruled on such state attempts to adopt similar laws.   The Administration contended that what Arizona has done is not to engage in a cooperative endeavor with the federal government, but to have its own immigration control policies — a field that the federal government contends is reserved to the national government. And the government argued that the state is using criminal prosecution in a field where the federal government has generally opted for civil remedies.

In a related immigration law matter: The Court issued a unanimous opinion today overturning a six-year-old policy of federal immigration officials that gave permanent resident aliens who committed crimes less chance of avoiding deportation than newly arrived non-aliens would have had before they were barred from admission.  

In the opinion by Justice Kagan in Judulang v. Holder (10-694), the Court said that the government need not treat those facing deportation exactly equally with those facing denial of admission, but it found that the current policy dating from 2005 was arbitrary, because it based comparisons between the two situations on arbitrary differences in what crimes are covered for deportees and for facing exclusion.  

At several points in her 21-page opinion, Kagan wrote that the policy was no less arbitrary than would have been a mere flipping of a coin to decide who among permanent resident aliens would be entitled to seek relief from deportation.  The decision apparently will force immigration officials to focus more closely on the specific details of each individual’s case for relief from deportation.