Governor Jan Brewer’s final act of defiance against the federal ‘guvmint’

Governor Jan Brewer, aka George Wallace in a dress, in a final act of defiance against the federal “guvmint” before she rides off into the sunset, is letting her Confederate freak flag fly.

Earlier this week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals told Brewer to go pound sand in response to her motion for stay of the Court’s order to allow Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) eligible DREAMers to obtain an Arizona drivers license during the pendency of Arizona’s lawsuit challenging President Obama’s executive order on DACA. Court moves closer to driver’s licenses for dreamers.

Consumed by hatred for people breathing while brown and spite for that Black man in the White House, Brewer has filed a motion for stay in the U.S. Supreme Court that almost reads like South Carolina’s Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify. States’ rights!

Justice Anthony Kennedy has called for a response to her application, to be filed by noon (Eastern time) next Tuesday, December 16.

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog reports, Arizona tests delayed deportation policies:

State officials in Arizona, seeking to block undocumented immigrants from getting driver’s licenses even if they have been spared from deportation, asked the Supreme Court today to examine new Obama administration moves on immigration policy.  This marked the first time that the Court has been drawn into the tense national debate over President Obama’s actions on immigration without waiting for Congress to act on a new law.

The Arizona application (14A625) is here; a challenged decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is here.  A federal district court ruling in the case is here.

Although the application is written in sweeping terms, contending that the Obama administration had no authority in 2012 or this year to delay deportation of individuals who entered the U.S. illegally and is refusing to enforce immigration law, its actual legal target is the impact of those policies on the question of who can get a driver’s license in Arizona.

It thus is not as direct a challenge to the president as a recently filed lawsuit, in a federal trial court in Brownsville, Texas, by twenty-four states — including Arizona — against the new policies.  A separate, narrower lawsuit against the administration’s latest action, by an Arizona county sheriff [Crazy Uncle Joe Arpaio], has been filed in a federal trial court in Washington, D.C.

Moreover, Republican leaders of the House of Representatives are reportedly considering adding a challenge to the new immigration orders to an already pending lawsuit challenging White House actions in implementing the Affordable Care Act.

All of those other legal challenges, however, are months and perhaps more than away from the Supreme Court, while Arizona’s new application — though limited — will give the Supreme Court an early look at the Obama initiatives.  The official documents that the government issued on the delayed-deportation actions are attached to Arizona’s application (in the exhibits here and here).

Under a policy that Arizona has followed for years, no one can obtain a driver’s license without proof that he is legally present in this country, under federal law.  Previously, the state would issue such a license to someone who was not a citizen but had been issued a work permit so that he could seek employment in the U.S.

The dispute that the state’s governor and other state officials have now taken to the Supreme Court involves the effect on its driver’s license policy of both the so-called “Dreamers” directive issued in 2012 and the deferred deportation policy announced by President Obama last month.

Under the June 2012 initiative, the federal government decided to put off for two years the deportation of undocumented immigrants under the age of thirty-one who were brought to the U.S. when they were children.  That policy allowed those individuals to seek work permits.

After Arizona refused to recognize work permits held by “Dreamers” who benefited from the new deferral policy, the state was sued by five of those individuals, along with an advocacy organization, the Arizona Dream Act Coalition.   A federal judge ruled that the state lacked any “rational basis” for denying them licenses, and thus violated their right to legal equality, but the judge refused to order the state to change its policy, finding that the “Dreamers” were not likely to suffer any real harm from the denial while the case proceeded in court.

The Ninth Circuit ruled that the judge should have issued a preliminary order to block the denial of driver’s licenses while the case moved forward.   The court of appeals found that the young applicants were likely to ultimately win their claim to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.  Other non-citizens, the three-judge panel ruled, are allowed to use such work permits as proof that they are in the U.S. legally and thus obtain driver’s licenses, so denial of that privilege to “Dreamers” was unconstitutional.

One of the judges on the panel also said that the Dreamers were likely to win on their separate claim that federal policy displaced Arizona’s policy on the legal significance of an immigrant’s work permit. That judge concluded that Arizona had created a new immigrant category, which federal law does not permit states to do.

Arizona, in taking the dispute on to the Supreme Court, acknowledged that the order requiring it to change its policy was only in a preliminary form, but it argued that the Ninth Circuit had actually re-written an existing Arizona law, rather than blocking a new law from taking effect.

Note: The U.S. Supreme Court rarely intervenes for an interlocutory order in a case being litigated in the lower courts. Rather than return to the U.S. District Court for Arizona to simply argue the merits of her case, Brewer plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals order allowing DACA eligible DREAMers to obtain Arizona drivers licenses during the pendency of the Arizona litigation, only adding to the cost of litigation and pissing away your tax dollars out of pure spite.

I would be surprised if the Supreme Court grants Arizona’s motion for stay or even its petition for appeal from the 9th Circuit Court order after its decision in Arizona v. United States in 2012, striking down much of SB 1070 on grounds of federal preemption in the arena of immigration law. The Court is likely to tell Arizona to pursue its case in the lower court and the regular process of appeal. It will then be the decision of governor-elect Doug Ducey, who should dismiss Governor Brewer’s lawsuit and save the state’s money.

Although the application focuses on the impact of the 2012 “Dreamers” policy, it also extended its argument to last month’s deferred deportation policy, which removed the age limit and extended the deferral option by a year, to three years. The application treats both of the initiatives as a form of “informal federal agency law” that was not authorized under federal immigration law.

The federal government, the state’s filing argued, can defer individual deportations, but the deferral process “is not meant to be used in the way” that the administration has done in 2012 and this year. The expansion of deferral announced last month, the state said, is an attempt to “unilaterally create, change or violate federal immigration law….Congress is solely responsible for making federal immigration law.”

The technical request by Arizona is for the Supreme Court to put the Ninth Circuit’s ruling requiring Arizona to change its driver’s license policy on hold, until after the Supreme Court acts on an appeal that Arizona will be filing. Its request was filed with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who handles emergency legal matters from the geographic region of the Ninth Circuit; Kennedy can act on his own or share action with his colleagues.

State officials indicated that, when they file their appeal in this case, they will be arguing that the government’s deferred deportation policies violate both the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers and the constitutional protection of states’ rights in a federalist system.

And, it added, the Tenth Amendment “mandates another layer of separation of powers between the federal government and the states.”

Jan Brewer believes that her executive order can trump the executive order of the president of the United States exercising prosecutorial discretion pursuant to federal immigration laws, a provision expressly granted the executive branch under federal immigration laws, which preempt the field of immigration law to the exclusion of the states. And then there is always the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the U.S. Constitution.

Our Confederate rebel governor is a loon.