The Supreme Court has ruled on the Arizona immigration law, and upheld a key part of the law that allows local law enforcement officers to verify immigration status if an individual is detained for another potential legal issue. The Washington Times announced the Obama administration’s response to this ruling as follows:
The Obama administration said Monday it is suspending existing agreements with Arizona police over enforcement of federal immigration laws, and said it has issued a directive telling federal authorities to decline many of the calls reporting illegal immigrants that the Homeland Security Department may get from Arizona police.So there, Arizona.
From this response, we see the president displaying what we have, unfortunately, come to know as his usual imperious, immature, tit-for-tat, brand of leadership. It’s the kind of leadership that tells the nation that if anybody, including the Supreme Court, disses him, the country will suffer as a result. He is the kind of president who is “high maintenance,” a president whose ego needs continued stroking, or else his temper gets the best of him.
The administration’s knee-jerk response to the Supreme Court’s decision, which essentially puts the enforcement of federal immigration law in the hands of the federal government, is to tell Arizona that they can call him for help with illegal immigrants, but he won’t be answering. In fact, the DOJ will have a special new hotline for those who believe their civil rights have been violated by local Arizona law enforcement officers.
This is the response of Barack Obama, the leader of our nation who is supposed to have vowed to protect and defend us and our borders.
As Bette Davis once said, “Buckle your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” What else can we expect from the president, if his signature healthcare law is overturned? What can we expect if the president loses his re-election bid?
Likely more of the same, with even more intensity. This is not a president who will ride off into the sunset, secure in the knowledge that he has done his best. This is not a president who will accept defeat as the will of the American people, if it is not his will. This is a president who will react strongly to regain what he perceives to be his imperial position, even if his response could, in the long term, be detrimental to the nation. Self-preservation is the name of the game with this president.
Perhaps just as ineffective and even damaging as his policies, this president’s responses to things not going his way tell us that he cannot be re-elected. The Supreme Court’s Arizona ruling, and the potential for its overturn of ObamaCare on Thursday, are direct challenges to the voters of this nation: Elect a president and a legislature that will uphold the rule of law as set forth in the Constitution.
In his dissenting opinion regarding the High Court’s decision to strike down the other sections of Arizona’s immigration law, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote:
Must Arizona's ability to protect its borders yield to the reality that Congress has provided inadequate funding for federal enforcement—or, even worse, to the executive's unwise targeting of that funding?...What I do fear—and what Arizona and the States that support it fear—is that “federal policies” of nonenforcement will leave the states helpless before those evil effects of illegal immigration.The federal government, Justice Scalia continued, "does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written, and leaves the states' borders unprotected against immigrants whom those laws would exclude."
Justice Scalia is sensing the fear that Americans have been experiencing for the past three years, enduring President Obama’s economic, foreign, job creation, healthcare, energy, and immigration policies. It’s up to American voters to end this cycle of fear in November.
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