Minnesota does not have the right to nullify federal laws by massive resistance.
ICE tactics are the pretext; the real issue is whether states can make themselves no-go zones immune from federal law.
The debate over what has been happening in
Minnesota is not about immigration policy or ICE tactics.
It is about whether federal law is sovereign everywhere in the country, or not. It is about whether massive resistance by states, cities, and street mobs can nullify federal law, or not. And just as was true on January 6, that question must be answered
first before we proceed to more mundane questions about
how our laws
should be executed, or whether they should be changed by democratic means.
Minnesota authorities [must] accept the legitimacy of American immigration law, including the deportation of illegal aliens and of the agency tasked by Congress with carrying out that role. It is a matter of sovereignty when the president says that he wishes to enforce federal law, and the governor of a state or the mayor of a city says that he is not allowed to.
Democratic politicians have made plain that their goal here is to stop ICE entirely from enforcing federal law in blue states.
Our federalist system has plenty of room for states to dissent from federal policies.... But outright refusal to help the straightforwardly binding laws of the country be carried out is corrosive to the federal compact.
It is a matter of sovereignty when protesters cross the line from simply making their grievances known to
swarming their movements, interposing themselves in the way of enforcement, stalking agents, pulling detainees out of their hands, using laser pointers and whistles to interfere with their vision and capacity to communicate, and using their cars as obstacles and weapons against federal agents.
If this can be done, then federal law as we have known it is at an end, and with it our democracy.
This is entirely a one-way street. Democrats dislike our immigration laws, and lacking either the votes in Congress to change them or a colorable constitutional argument to overturn them in court, they believe that they have a right to nullify them by massive resistance.
Our Constitution is on thin ice.
ICE tactics are the pretext; the real issue is whether states can make themselves no-go zones immune from federal law.
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