High Court Puts SB 4 on Life Support
Before Giving State Green Light on Law
Breaking: Supreme Court Allows Texas to Enforce SB 4
Editor's Note: The story below was posted on Tuesday morning. But the U.S. Supreme Court effectively invalidated it two hours later in a move that no one including Governor Greg Abbott expected. The high court voted 6-3 to allow the state to enforce the law, which the justices had blocked three times in the past two weeks, pending appeals from the U.S. Justice Department.
Capitol Inside
March 19, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court extended Governor Greg Abbott's losing streak in the judiciary on border security on Monday when it blocked a Texas migrant arrest and deportation law from taking effect for an indefinite period of time in a ruling that had been a foregone conclusion from day one.
Capitol Inside has explained multiple times in recent months why the plan that Abbott goaded GOP lawmakers into passing last fall in special session would have no chance to survive in the judiciary. This didn't take a law degree or clairvoyant powers.
The law that GOP leaders packaged in Senate Bill 4 was doomed from the start as a bald-face attempt to hijack a federal responsibility in a purely partisan power play based on five-alarm rhetoric on an alleged invasion that is only taking place in the minds of a paranoid party base on the far right. SB 4 was legislative malpractice of the highest order - a measure that was designed to dupe primary voters into believing that the GOP-controlled Legislature was doing everything in its power to protect them from bloodthirsty migrants, foreign terrorists and trigger-happy cartel members.
More than a dozen representatives who are lawyers voted for SB 4 even though it was a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to circumvent federal law that it violated in doing so. The House Republican sponsor who's an attorney assured his GOP colleagues that SB 4 would remain intact in the courts when he should have known better.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick promised Texans that SB 4 would be a success in the judicial system. Patrick, who's not a lawyer, enlisted an accountant to serve as the immigration takeover measure's author in the Senate. Four senators who are attorneys by trade supported the deportation bill that was destined to fail as monumental overreach on the part of a state with a badly bloated border security program that's been all for show and hasn't stopped a single migrant from entering the U.S.
Abbott and the Republicans got tired of reading here about Operation Lone Star's most telling statistic being stuck at zero for three years at a cost somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion for Texas taxpayers to bear. SB 4 would have made it possible to start sending people back to Mexico for the crime of immigrating to the United States without proper documentation. The law that SCOTUS has defused was a slap in the face of the Statue of Liberty - an act of monumental incompetence that would have given states the ability to take over federal programs and duties based on sound bytes and fear mongering.
None of the Republicans who backed SB 4 have mustered the guts that it would take to face the truth about the bill. Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan remained in denial in the wake of the latest high court decision on Monday night.
"SB 4 would have served as the strongest border security law in the country, but now that tool has been robbed from our toolbox to America’s further detriment," Phelan said in a post in X. "The state looks forward to seeing it ultimately upheld and go into effect. Despite President Biden’s complete disregard for the safety and security of our communities, Texas will never give up the fight to defend our land and secure our borders."
Abbott vowed that the state would keep trying to make life hard as possible for the people who enter the state illegally.
"SCOTUS temporarily halted enforcement of SB 4 but Texas is still using its authority to arrest illegal immigrants for criminal trespass and other violations of law," the governor tweeted. "We continue building the wall, use NG to erect razor wire barriers to repel migrants & buoys remain in river."
NG - for those who don't speak OLS lingo - is a reference to the Texas National Guard that hasn't forced one migrant back to Mexico despite Abbott's persistent claims about "holding the line" on an ostensible border crisis that the Republicans blame exclusively on President Joe Biden.
But Abbott and the Republicans in Austin have stubbornly refused to prepare the state for the inevitable by being ready to train migrants for the workplace as the backbone of the American economy and cogs for future prosperity in the Lone Star State.
A former state attorney general and Supreme Court judge, Abbott mistakenly assumed that the U.S. Supreme Court would rubber stamp SB 4 based on the fact that a majority of justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Abbott suffered his first significant setback in SCOTUS late last year when it ruled that the Border Patrol could tear down razor wire fencing that he ordered the Guard to erect at the Rio Grande. His defiance on that ruling could have hurt SB 4's odds for survival if wasn't going to get tossed on its own merits anyway.
more to come ... |
