For anyone suffering from post-Obamacare-argument Supreme Court withdrawal, this Wednesday the Court takes up Arizona’s controversial Senate Bill (“SB”) 1070. See my blogpost from when the Court granted review for some background.
SB 1070 is much-misunderstood: it has nothing to do with sexy political issues like racial profiling and everything to do with boring legal ones like whether a given state provision is “preempted” by federal law. That is, do the various parts of the state law – each one of which the Court will be evaluating independently – conflict with federal law (direct preemption) or intrude in an area exclusively reserved to Congress (implied preemption).
United States v. Arizona shows that there’s a difference between what’s constitutional and what’s good policy. SB 1070 was crafted to mirror federal law rather than asserting new state powers that interfere with federal authority over immigration. That’s why lower courts only enjoined four of its provisions and why the Supreme Court would not be wrong to resurrect even those four.
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