On Monday the Court will hear argument in United States v. Texas, in which Texas and twenty-five other states are challenging the Obama administration’s initiatives deferring removal of millions of unauthorized immigrants.
Simon Lazarus, Senior Counsel to the Constitutional Accountability Center, argues at The New Republic that the challenge by Texas and other states “faces a host of heavyweight conservative authorities, of recent as well as long-established vintage, strongly supporting President Barack Obama’s position that deferring removal for parents of citizens and permanent residents for three years, subject to individual exceptions on a case-by-case basis, fits within the ample enforcement discretion prescribed by immigration statutes and the Constitution.” Even Conservatives Agree on Obama’s Immigration Powers. Will the Supreme Court?
I recently testified . . . at the request of the Democratic minority on the House Judiciary Committee, at a poorly attended March 15 hearing before the committee’s Task Force on Executive Overreach. Iowa Representative Steve King, the task force’s chairman, railed against the “abuse of executive power.” But as the hearing wore on, Republican members merely perfunctorily pushed back against Democrats’ citations of the breadth of discretionary enforcement authority, as in the 2002 Homeland Security Act—signed by President George W. Bush and enacted by lopsided House and Senate majorities (including Republican members in the hearing room). In terms as direct as it is possible to draft, the act commands DHS to “establish immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” After contrasting this and other Republican-supported provisions with “overheated rhetoric” condemning “the president’s immigration actions,” California Democrat Zoe Lofgren observed, “If you don’t like what’s happening, look in the mirror. It’s what we asked him to do.” To this, Raul Labrador, an Idaho Republican and anti-immigration hard-liner, candidly responded, “I completely agree that sometimes Congress has punted and has given the executive too much authority. … It’s just we don’t want to write precise laws, so we write these broad laws and then we give the executive all this power, all this authority.”
