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Immigration Ruling "Big Win" for Obama, Scalia & AZ - Not So Much

Editor Tom Goldstein of the SCOTUS Blog calls the Immigration Ruling a "Big Win" for Obama Administration in discussion with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.

I think the Administration has to be very happy with the decision in the Arizona immigration case. They clearly won with respect to three of the four provisions of the very tough Arizona immigration law and it was basically a tie on the fourth. They didn't lose. The Supreme Court saying that on the ask for your papers provision, they didn't know enough about how the statute would be applied to know whether it was constitutional or not and they would have to wait to decide that question. They made pretty clear that you could ask for immigration papers if you had a reasonable cause if you weren't going to hold people for too long just to check their immigration status. So it does uphold that principle which is very important to a lot of Conservatives who favor the law that you can ask about the status but beyond that, it was a big win for the Obama Administration.

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Wall Street Journal Law Blog also has a great interview with Professor Peter Spiro of Temple University,an expert on immigration law, talking about the Arizona Immigration Law Ruling:

Hi, Peter. Thanks for taking the time. After reading over the opinion, what’s your immediate takeaway?

Well, it’s a split decision in that both sides got a bit of what they wanted. But in my view, it’s really only nominally a split decision. I think it’s mostly a victory for opponents of the law.

...*snip*...

Remind us again what 2(B) enabled the federal government to do, if you would.

Sure. That portion allows state authorities to ask someone to show his or her immigration papers if the officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person might be here illegally.

But 2(B) really doesn’t have any teeth, at least not in the way other provisions of the law do. 2(B) allows state officials to call [the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency] and say ‘hey, we think someone’s here illegally.’ But ICE doesn’t necessarily have to do anything in response to the state’s call.

And that’s part of why I really think this is mostly a win for the law’s opponents. Two of the three provisions that were struck down outright did have teeth — they allowed the state to put an alien in jail.

And 2(B) could be struck down later?

Right. The court ruled on the facial challenge to the law. But it’s kicking back to the lower courts the issue of whether the law is constitutional in the ways in which it gets applied. For now, we’ll have to allow those to work their way through the court system

...*snip*...

Justice Antonin Scalia, one of three dissenting justices, read a fairly scathing statement from the bench. What did you make of this?

It struck me as so much crying in the wilderness, to be honest. His view is pretty jurisprudentially extreme, and I think it could likely be the last time that Scalia gets to weigh on in immigration issues during his court tenure.

But I think a broad takeaway here is that on a court divided such as this one is, it’s Justice Kennedy who calls the shots.