A feature, not a bug
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 13 years ago, in 2011, on the World Wide Web.
So border-psychotic Jan Brewer, proponent of ethnic cleansing and arbitrary Governor over the state of Arizona, is unhappy with the U.S. federal government. The Feds recently got part of her racist Papers-Please police-state bill struck down in court; so she has decided to sue them back:
Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona said Thursday that she will raise private funds to countersue the federal government for failing to enforce immigration laws…. At a news conference, Ms. Brewer and Attorney General Tom Horne said the Obama administration had failed to prevent illegal immigrants from crossing the border in huge numbers and stuck the state with the cost of dealing with its failed policies…. In their legal challenge, the state intends to argue that it is being "invaded" by illegal immigrants from Mexico.
— Arizona: State Countersues Over Immigration Law, New York Times Briefs (11 February 2011)
This is of course a desperate stab at protecting a vicious and idiotic policy — in which a tiny minority of power-mongering Arizonans are trying to use a suit in federal court to get the U.S.’s paramilitary Border Patrol and Immigration Enforcement squads to pour into their state, in order to assault, imprison, and exile the large number of perfectly peaceful travelers and longtime residents of Arizona, who happen to be there without papers from the federal government; but in a typical statist inversion, it is the peaceful travelers and the longtime residents, not the militarized, due-process-free federal occupation forces that are described as invaders.
Ho, ho.
However, while I can’t say I have any sympathy for Jan Brewer or her fellow power-mongers, I can say that I’m actually glad to hear about this lawsuit. Why? Because, as A Spokesman For The Department of Homeland Security puts it:
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, Matt Chander said in a statement in response,
A meritless claim such as this does nothing to secure the border.— Arizona: State Countersues Over Immigration Law, New York Times Briefs (11 February 2011)
Precisely; that’s why, despicable as I think Brewer’s cause is, I’m happy to see the claim being pressed. Every day and every dollar that the state government spends fighting a futile court battle with the federal government is another day and another dollar that won’t go towards securing
government control over borders, or to designing and passing more idiotic power-trip police-state laws like SB 1070. The more bickering they do and the less security
they’re able to inflict, the better it’ll be for all peaceful people making an honest living.
I hope this stupid lawsuit lasts forever.
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I don’t think Jan is going to win.
“Bowers v. Devito, 686 F.2d 616 (7th Cir. 1982) (There is no constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen. It is monstrous if the state fails to protect its residents against such predators but it does not violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, or, we suppose, any other provision of the Constitution. The Constitution is a charter of negative liberties; it tells the state to let the people alone; it does not require the federal government or the state to provide services, even so elementary a service as maintaining law and order.;”
WorBlux,
I also think it’s unlikely that the apartheid government of Arizona will win in court. For what it’s worth, though (which isn’t much), the legal issue in the case is probably going to different in kind from the issue in Bowers. The ruling in Bowers had to do with the relationship between (1) governments under the United States Constitution and (2) individual citizens. The plaintiff was claiming that the state government had violated a murder victim’s due process rights by failing to adequately protect her from being murdered. The court ruled that the Due Process clause required only that state governments not act in certain ways, not that they have any positive obligations whatever towards citizens. (Which is no surprise: the basic feature of sovereign governments is its irresponsibility: we are accountable to them for everything, while they are accountable to us for nothing. Like all forms of domination, it is unilateral, and whatever it may chivalrously extend us are extended only at the pleasure of the sovereign.)
But the issue that the Arizona border-crats want to sue the Feds over doesn’t have to do with the relationship between state governments and citizens; it has to do with the relation between the United States government and the state governments. While the Court has repeatedly held that governments under the U.S. Constitution have no positive duty to protect individuals, the Constitution clearly declares that the United States government does have some positive duties to protect state governments and their interests.
In particular, I would not be surprised at all if the apartheid regime bases a substantial part of its legal argument on Article IV § 4, which states that the Feds have positive duties to They are claiming that the Feds are failing to halt an (the only known peaceful and unarmed in the history of the world, I suppose), so.
(Fun fact: the last time that Article IV § 4 played such a public role in political debate over the Constitution was during the late 1850s and early 1860s — when the about-to-secede Southern states used it to insist that the central government was failing in its duty to adequately enforce the Fugitive Slave Act or the slavocratic state governments from slave uprisings. As usual, the international apartheid movement is in the company of some real winners.)
Of course, personally I don’t really care how the Constitution balances powers among the powerful — whether it holds (as the court will probably say it will) that the Feds are absolutely sovereign in this matter, or whether they hold that they have some positive duties to the state governments that the statocrats can legally hold them to. I expect the Feds will win, because they usually do these does, but I don’t care any more than I — not being a Muslim — care about whether or not what the Feds are failing to do violates an orthodox interpretation of Shariah. If the Constitution does require the Feds to rigorously enforce their odious border police state or to invade Arizona with hundreds of paramilitary thugs in order to more fully complete the program of international apartheid, well, then so much the worse for the Constitution. I was already convinced that the damn thing was a covenant with Death and an agreement with Hell, and that would be just one more reason to say so.