In a somewhat stunning move, the Obama administration has moved to block a new Arizona state law to eliminate illegal immigrants in the desert border state by deporting anyone stopped without papers. While the move from Arizona is big, the state has a big problem. Arizona’s southern borders are a great deal of the 2,000 miles of southern borderland between the United States and Mexico. By blocking this fully legal deportation of individuals who don’t carry their passports, the Obama administration has shone a glaring light on the real work that these illegal/day/migrant workers do here in the United States. Moreover, the Obama administration has kicked it up a notch with regard to the Big-Brother state that some predicted from a Democratic administration. I am no Republican, but I am definitely opposed to this Obama-backed plan.
Obama Sues Arizona: How it Went Down:
According to a New York Times report on the matter, the announcement went down sort of nonchalantly. “…Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton…answered a question about (the lawsuit) from an Ecuadorian TV journalist in an interview…reiterating the publicly stated objections of President Obama and senior officials to the Arizona law, Mrs. Clinton said of the president, ‘The Justice Department, under his direction, will be bringing a lawsuit against the act.'” Whether or not Clinton was supposed to have leaked the confirmation of this news for the President or not, the implications are pretty huge.
Obama Sues Arizona: Backlash:
There are so many low-hanging fruits for Obama’s opposition to choose from. First of all, the matter of stating domestic policy on foreign soil seems a little unorthodox, which might be what Obama was going for. Or, the gaffe might have just been a slip-up by the otherwise generally cool, calculating Mrs. Clinton. Then, there is the matter of these Tea Bagger whackos; they have been having a field day with this news.
Of course, there is the idea behind individual states rights. This is the area with this lawsuit where I see the biggest potential problem. Once we’ve gotten past the semantics of who said what to whom and where, it seems the biggest issue that the Obama administration is going to have is that of individual states’ rights.
The 10th Amendment clearly says: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This was a big deal around the Civil War, this was a big deal with the secession of the South and this is still a big deal to people in states from New Hampshire to California, South Carolina to Arizona.
The second Obama steps in to try to impose his will on the states, it will be bye-bye Mr. President and “All-Hail-King-Obama!”
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_%E2%80%93_United_States_border
