Supreme Court of Fools

If you ever wondered if the current Supreme Court was not politically motivated – and if you have wondered, which planet have you been living on? – consider the dissent today of Justice Antonin Scalia of the court’s striking down three of the four provisions of Arizona’s anti-immigration (and blatantly discriminatory) law:

“The husbanding of scarce enforcement resources can hardly be the justification for this, since those resources will be eaten up by the considerable administrative cost of conducting the nonenforcement program, which will require as many as 1.4 million background checks and biennial rulings on requests for dispensation,” Scalia said. He went on: “But to say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of federal immigration law that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind.” He blasted “a federal government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written, and leaves the states’ borders unprotected against immigrants whom those laws exclude.”

Scalia’s dissent boggles my mind more than the majority decision boggles his. What in any of his delusional rambling refers to the Constitution? The executive branch (the president and the Justice Department) has the discretion to execute the laws. If the Congress can’t or won’t allocate resources to execute the laws, then the executive has to balance needs with resources. And beyond that, “profiling,” as implied in the Arizona immigration law, is unconstitutional on its face. This isn’t the first political decision (albeit a dissent) this court has issued, and it won’t be the last. The whole concept of an ideological “impartial” court is a farce. For that matter, so is the concept of our “democracy.”