With “each decision … unabashedly based not on law,” the Court moves “one step closer to being reminded of [its] impotence,” warned late Justice Antonin Scalia in his Obergefell v. Hodges dissent (2015). Now, a decade later, the judiciary has just gotten a major reminder.
That is, an Obama-appointed activist judge recently “ordered” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to halt a state immigration law’s enforcement. And the people-elected realist Uthmeier has responded, saying, in essence:
Go pound sand.
As Fox News reported Friday:
The law allows for misdemeanor charges against illegal immigrants who enter Florida and hope to avoid federal immigration officials.
“The judge wants me to put my stamp of approval on an order prohibiting all state law enforcement from enforcing Florida’s immigration laws when no law enforcement are party to the lawsuit,” he [Uthmeier] said, as the ACLU’s suit is being adjudicated before Obama-appointed Miami federal judge Kathleen Williams.
“I’m just not going to do that. We believe the court has overstepped and lacks jurisdiction there, and I will not tell law enforcement to stop fulfilling their constitutional duties,” Uthmeier … told Fox News Digital.
“… The ACLU is dead set on obstructing President Donald Trump’s efforts to detain and deport illegals, and we are going to fight back. We will vigorously defend our laws and advance President Trump’s agenda on illegal immigration.”
The lawsuit that spurred the injunction alleges Florida’s law violates the Supremacy Clause….
Stay in Your Lane, Your Honor
As to the AG’s reasoning, the Miami Herald provided more detail, writing Wednesday:
Uthmeier’s office argued that the immigrant groups’ lawsuit only applies to his office and state prosecutors in Florida, noting that “a court’s judgment binds only the parties to a suit.”
Lawyers for his office argued the judge’s ruling does not apply to “independent” law enforcement agencies, such as the Florida Highway Patrol, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, county sheriffs’ offices and local police.
“They are not parties,” the attorney general’s office asserted, because they are not “in active concert or participation with” his office and state prosecutors in Florida.
Uthmeier also emphasized that Williams’ application of the order to non-parties was an “after-the-fact expansion” of it. This was “wrong,” he said.
As for Judge Williams, she said she was “shocked” that the AG defied her “order.” A hearing is scheduled, too, for May 15, during which Uthmeier may be found in contempt. Yet maybe Williams, and most of the judiciary, need to be “shocked” — back into reality. After all, Constitution-conversant observers have long been shocked at how so many judges have contempt for the Constitution. This they exhibit every time they violate it in the name of imposing an agenda from the bench.
Practical Matters
To paraphrase the paraphrase of President Andrew Jackson, “The courts have made their decision; now let them enforce it.” Note here, too, that Jackson was referencing a case, Worcester v. Georgia (1832), somewhat mirroring the current one. It also involved a state that was ignoring a federal court “order.”
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