“If the justices approach their task as judges and not as politicians, the administration will easily prevail”
Prominent legal analyst Linda Greenhouse assesses the stakes of the Supreme Court’s upcoming immigration executive action case, United States v. Texas, in a new must-read opinion piece published in today’s New York Times.
United States v. Texas will decide the fate of the DAPA/DACA expansion executive actions, affecting the lives and futures of millions of undocumented Americans with longstanding roots and ties to the U.S. However, Greenhouse concludes that the integrity of the Supreme Court itself also is at stake in the case, concluding her analysis as follows:
“…[A] court genuinely mindful of principles of judicial restraint would not even need to reach the statutory question, let alone the constitutional one. The states’ claim to injury, let alone the kind of injury that gives them standing to sue for nonenforcement of the immigration laws is even more tenuous than the long-ago claim of the environmentalists, thrown out of court by Justice Scalia’s Lujan decision. (I discussed the issue of the states’ standing in an earlier column.
This is a case that should have been tossed out of Federal District Court in the first instance. Instead, its stakes are now heightened enormously. If the justices approach their task as judges and not as politicians, the administration will easily prevail. It is the Roberts court that now needs to take care.”
Greenhouse’s full analysis, titled “The Supreme Court vs. the President,” is well-worth reading and available online here.
