Announced, just now, on
the SCOTUSblog live-blog of the Court.
Here's how SCOTUSblog described the issue in the case, which is called
Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting:
Whether an Arizona statute that imposes sanctions on employers who hire unauthorized aliens is invalid under a federal statute that expressly “preempt[s] any State or local law imposing civil or criminal sanctions (other than through licensing and similar laws) upon those who employ, or recruit or refer for a fee for employment, unauthorized aliens”; whether the Arizona statute, which requires all employers to participate in a federal electronic employment verification system, is preempted by a federal law that specifically makes that system voluntary; whether the Arizona statute is impliedly preempted because it undermines the “comprehensive scheme” that Congress created to regulate the employment of aliens.
According to the live-blog, the decision was 5-3 (with Kagan recused). Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor are the dissenters.
The Chief Justice's opinion explains that the licensing provision falls squarely within a savings clause in federal immigration law and that the Arizona statute does not otherwise conflict with federal law.
Here's the PDF of the opinion.
Posts
42 comments:
Wise Latina dissents.
No, no, RHH: Justice Sotomayor said "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life." But she didn't say that she was a wise Latina, and apropos, she more often than not reaches exactly the same conclusion as Justice Breyer, a white male who hasn't lived that life.
Considering some of the duds they have delivered on the American people, I can't imagine how they got this one right.
So this decision supports the Federal power to enact a "scheme of regulations" that pre-empt State laws on the subject...but the pre-emptive law the Feds enacted exempted State actions on Licensing of businesses. That should really anger King Obama who rules by edicts and not laws.
When you have a president choosing which laws he is going to enforce, I believe is perfectly natural for the states to go their own way.. or at least try some remedies of their own.
Democrats hit hardest.
This will go down as the turning point when the economy began to improve for average Americans.
Without a steady inflow of illegal slave labor from Mexico, Arizona businesses will have to compete for employees by improving the living standards of all of its citizens. And that means raising wages.
We will quickly see similar laws in the red states, while the illegal aliens will migrate to the blue states. Poverty and crime associated with this influx will skyrocket in Democrat territories and blue state budgets will quickly balloon as entitlement spending soars out of control. This will bankrupt states like New York and Massachusetts (havens for illegal aliens).
And since the federal government will be in the hands of Republicans, there won't be any bailout of the blue state renegade confederate states we will be at war with economically.
Hopefully, this will lead to the second Civil War ... just as slave labor led to the first one by tilting the economic playing field.
Democrats will no longer have a steady new supply of illegal alien fraud voters and this spells the death knell of the Socialist party in the United States.
Annie getcher gun.
And Sumi has ruled, in non-surprising fashion: http://www.thewheelerreport.com/releases/May11/0526/0526sumi.pdf
A recent post noted Justice Kennedy's failings as a writer. Something I notice: When I know that Kennedy wrote the opinion, I read the syllabus and skip the opinion because I know the former will more concisely explain the holding than the latter. When I know that Roberts wrote the opinion, it's the other way around.
SWISH!!!!!!!
*All net*
Now go home.
Good. Holder going after this one just didn't make sense. I thought the meme was that unscrupulous employees were willfully hiring illegals and underpaying them (as in this recent bust)
So from that perspective I thought E-verify was a good thing that all could agree to.
"The Chamber’s argument that the Arizona law is not a “licensing” law be-cause it operates only to suspend and revoke licenses rather than to grant them is without basis in law, fact, or logic."
That, my friends, is a judicial bitch slap.
This is a no brainer.
And if you are serious about immigration reform, you don't build a giant fence along the southern border, you make employers verify citizen and residency status and fine them if they violate those rules. The drive for illegal immigration is jobs.
This is a stunningly rational decision affirming states rights and bitch-slapping criminal business enterprises and other illegal syndicates.
Scalia: "... an employer acting in good faith need not fear the law’s sanctions. Moreover, federal and state anti-discrimination laws protect against employment discrimination and provide employers with a strong incentive not to discriminate. (Legitimate) Employers also enjoy safe harbors from liability when using E-Verify as required by the Arizonalaw. The most rational path for employers is to obey both the law
barring the employment of unauthorized aliens and the law prohibit-ing discrimination."
Read that again and savor its logical nougatty goodness: The Supreme Court just ruled that the most rational thing for these criminal employers to do is to obey the fucking laws we've passed to protect legal workers or have your license to conduct business revoked.
End. of. story.
" ... and fine them if they violate those rules."
No, a fine isn't enough. If you fine businesses for hiring illegal workers, then the businesses will respond by raising prices and accept the fine as part of the cost of doing business.
Arizona KILLS criminal businesses by revoking their right to conduct business at all. And they did that because it's the only thing that really works. Criminal business owners (such as the nation's largest agri-businesses) must fear the end of their right to conduct business if they knowingly hire illegal aliens.
Again, as the Supreme Court said, any business that merely makes a mistake need not fear any penalty. ONLY blatantly criminal enterprises (such as the Jewish meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa) have anything to fear from this completely logical law.
At least Sotomayor did not become the latina equivalent of an Uncle Tom. You have to give her credit for putting her race (ha!) above logic, reason or the laws of the land.
On wonders why is it that ONLY Jewish members of the court dissented (Breyer and Ginsberg and probably Kagan if she had been allowed to participate).
Why this religious dichotomy?
Best line, from footnote 6 in the majority opinion, "It should not be surprising that the two dissents have sharply differ-ent views on how to read the statute. That is the sort of thing that can happen when statutory analysis is so untethered from the text." Ouch.
A $10,000 fine for every illegal alien in your employ.
Do it and cut the shit.
And no, I don't count the wise Latina, who shouldn't even have been allowed to participate in this case because of her obvious conflict of interest.
One point the other side could make (politically) is that there might be an increase in identity theft.
A remedy to that would be to either send them back home, make them legal or a combination of the two.
"A $10,000 fine for every illegal alien in your employ."
Nope, end their entire businesses. Just end them. End the whole enterprise.
That's the ticket. Put the fear of death into these criminal enterprises. Remember ... ONLY criminal enterprise and other crime syndicates are employing illegal aliens knowingly.
There might be some businesses which have accidently done it and, once notified, would never do it again ... but ONLY criminal enterprises are KNOWINGLY hiring illegal workers.
A fine is not enough to deter them. They must be put out of bidness altogether. We have no obligation as citizens to allow criminals to conduct business in our communities with impunity.
@Lem: "When you have a president choosing which laws he is going to enforce, I believe is perfectly natural for the states to go their own way.. or at least try some remedies of their own."
Well said.
Hiring illegals doesn't raise your profits unless you're the only one doing it.
It lowers prices to consumers.
And if you are serious about immigration reform, you don't build a giant fence along the southern border, you make employers verify citizen and residency status and fine them if they violate those rules. The drive for illegal immigration is jobs.
No, if you're serious you do both.
The Chief assigns cases when his opinion is shared around the table (of 9). Rehnquist never got the pleasure. Because Sandra Da O'Connor "offered" her vote in exchange for being an author of the "opinion." For this you need a minimum of 5 votes. Rehnquist sat on the outside, seething.
Sandra Day O'Connor could go in either direction, just as long as she got to WRITE IT! Forks and plastic reindeer, developed.
Roberts is doing better! And, Kagan? She may, perhaps, be challanged on her lying testimony to the Senate, to get confirmed. (It depends on November 2012.) That she recuses herself? I'd like to see her depart.
At some point, ahead, (unknown to us now), another president, if he or she is liked by the American people, and there are two terms. With a Congress that's republican AND, truly independent of the "sewer click" that swings through both parties ... We will see changes.
FDR, when he came in, had a conservative court. He couldn't "pack them." But in time he changed all the seated heads. And, that's how liberalism shot through the door.
Time will tell.
Don't lose hope.
Just consider this: Back in the 1800's we didn't have fancy universities in America. The rich had to send their kids to paris. Or oxford. (The dumber kids couldn't handle french.)
All those fancy institutions bit the dust, to us. And, yes. There can come a day when someone tells you they carry a haavahd credential, you just laugh and ask "so, how much did it cost?"
The great french fashion designers also got replaced. Today, jeans rule. And, jeans were a fabric used to make the pants of cowboys. Because it could stand up to rough riding.
Meanwhile, good for Roberts to get the votes to give himself the ability to assign majority cases. If this continues? Someday, Sotomayor will only get tax cases. Her brains will get scrambled. Latina eggs on toast.
On wonders why is it that ONLY Jewish members of the court dissented (Breyer and Ginsberg and probably Kagan if she had been allowed to participate).
Sotomayor dissented, and she isn't Jewish.
Hiring illegals doesn't raise your profits unless you're the only one doing it.
It lowers prices to consumers.
It seems to me it could go either way. If you charge x for a hammer, and suddenly unloading trucks of hammers, stocking hammers, and checking out purchases of hammers gets dirt cheap due to illegal labor, you keep charging the same price, but your profit margin has increased.
"It lowers prices to consumers."
It seems to me it could go either way. If you charge x for a hammer, and suddenly unloading trucks of hammers, stocking hammers, and checking out purchases of hammers gets dirt cheap due to illegal labor, you keep charging the same price, but your profit margin has increased.
If something is unusually profitable, other sellers flock in, because it's the most profitable activity around.
They flock in until it isn't.
That means that the price comes down.
Granted. But hiring illegal help isn't something that you broadcast, so you should be able to realize the profit margin, while keeping your prices similar to the local market (in this hypothetical), for quite some time, no? Who goes around telling competitors that they are using illegal means to increase margin?
If hiring illegals means you have a workforce that doesn't pay taxes but does use government services, you increase the taxpayer burden.
Also, the number of unemployed American citizens who can't (or won't) compete with underpaid illegal immigrants increases the burden on the taxpayer.
So lower consumer prices don't necessarily mean a lower overall price paid by taxpayers.
Sotomayor's dissent seems a bit dotty.
"Sotomayor dissented, and she isn't Jewish."
Sotomayor's opinion doesn't count and is irrelevant, because her opinion represents a conflict of interest which should have precluded her from being involved in this case. She sullied the Supreme Court and brought disrepute onto the court for having failed to properly recuse herself from this case.
Nevertheless, all the Jews were opposed (including Kagan, who did rightly recuse herself for HER conflicts of interest).
"If hiring illegals means you have a workforce that doesn't pay taxes but does use government services, you increase the taxpayer burden."
Not only that, but wages across the board are depressed because of the illegal slave wages paid to these criminals.
The only people benefiting are the owners of the illegal criminal enterprises and crime syndicates which knowingly import and hire these criminals.
Society pays for their profits through higher taxes, depressed wages and a poorer quality of life.
Take. Their. Businesses.
You can have your business license revoked.
Still, this isn't the decision we're all waiting for having to do with whether Arizonan police can ask to check the papers of blatantly persons suspected of being illegal.
Now only employers can do that, or rather, must do that, if they don't themselves wish to become illegals.
It's a small step for mankind but a big step for Arizona.
"It's a small step for mankind but a big step for Arizona."
It's a HUGE step for Amerikind. Without the ability to (wink wink) "work" in Arizona, these illegal aliens will be forced to flee elsewhere for their illegal wages.
That will immediately create hundreds of thousands of jobs for real Americans in Arizona and go a long way toward solving the employment crisis there. Real wages will also rise significantly as employers outbid each other for talented, hard-working Americans hungry for good jobs.
The tax base will grow and solve the state funding crisis as a result. The quality of life will dramatically increase very quickly.
Initially, the illegal aliens will flee to friendlier states - blue Democrat Party states - where they will be welcomed with open arms and bi-lingual instructions for how to execute a Democrat-only fraudulent election ballot.
Initially, those Democrat states will see an uptick in economic activity as illegals pour in, but that will last for only a short period of time because the illegals won't be paying taxes but they'll be consuming all the tax resources.
Detroit, anyone?
Eventually, Americans will get tired of having to "punch two for English" and the political tidal wave sweeping Democrats and Socialists from power everywhere in the world will wash over all the blue states - assuming there isn't a civil war first.
Which there likely will be a civil war, since the blue, illegal alien confederate slave states will try to use their slave labor to steal jobs and economic futures away from the children of legal citizens in the red states.
Eventually, blood will spill again over the legal slave trade that is illegal immigration in the Democrat Party.
Assuming this gets instituted and is actually enforced as such, the thing to watch for anti-immigration folks will be the costs of public services. If illegals are fleeing the state due to the unauthorized worker jobs drying up, we should see Arizona enjoy a reduction (whatever that percentage is) in public spending on illegals accessing public services.
In other words, I'm sure there are anti-amnesty/illegal immigration thinkers out there that can or have estimated Arizona's bill for illegals hitting their public services. It would be interesting to see if those estimations play out as correct.
nevadabob said...
"'Sotomayor dissented, and she isn't Jewish.' Sotomayor's opinion doesn't count and is irrelevant, because her opinion represents a conflict of interest which should have precluded her from being involved in this case. She sullied the Supreme Court and brought disrepute onto the court for having failed to properly recuse herself from this case."
And that conflict of interest is...?
"And that conflict of interest is...?
... Sotomayor's entire court history of epic judicial bias in which she has never held against a single Latino defendant vs. a white defendant.
Disrepute stains the United States Supreme Court because Satormayor did not recuse herself due to her blatant racial hatred of white people.
It's a start. Unfortunately, other incentives for illegal immigration are not addressed, including: welfare and other social programs, and education.
In any case, there is no valid reason to support unmeasured immigration, especially illegal immigration, when there is a large and growing welfare class, unemployed, and youth in America.
It is especially harmful when the presence of illegal aliens causes massive distortions in the job market and in the larger economy.
Not to mention that it justifies the large welfare class funded through involuntary exploitation (e.g., taxes), which promotes progressive corruption of individuals and systems.
There is also the matter of increased incidence of murder, rape, and other forms of involuntary exploitation.
It is a shame when so-called "civil rights" businesses, including the ACLU and others, conspire with foreign governments and interests to subvert the civil rights of American citizens and other legal residents.
In addition to other concerns previously mentioned, we should also consider the reasons which motive over 1 million people annually to leave their home nations. The corruption in their governments and criminal syndicates will not be corrected through deferment.
Anyway, it is a positive first measure.
nevadabob said...
"[Sotomayor's conflict of interest is] her blatant racial hatred of white people."
I think we all knew what your answer was, but I'm surprised you're willing to state so disreputable a thing openly.
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