Today, the House Judiciary Committee is beginning its assault on President Obama’s new executive order for immigrants, with a hearing entitled “President Obama’s Executive Overreach on Immigration.” The Republican majority gets three witnesses, one of which is a Mr. Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice.
Sekulow has ties to extremism and is a questionable source of authority for what is and is not constitutional. What’s relevant here is Arizona’s SB 1070 anti-immigrant law, which was signed into law in 2010 and was promptly blocked by lawsuits that eventually led to the Supreme Court case Arizona v US (2012). In 2010, Sekulow and his organization worked with the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) to draft amicus curiae briefs supporting SB 1070. IRLI is, of course, a group associated with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a hate group, and John Tanton, a known white supremacist. And Arizona’s SB 1070 law was mostly gutted by the Supreme Court for being unconstitutional. Keep that in mind when Sekulow gives testimony today on executive action, legal authority, what’s constitutional, and the rule of law.
Read Sekulow’s 2010 brief with IRLI on SB 1070:
