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| Connecticut's General Assembly, Ritter presiding |
The matter has not yet been decided in court, but there assuredly will be winners and losers.
The U.S. Federal government, its back put against the wall
by a Connecticut law that questions the authority of the federal government to
operate in certain Connecticut jurisdictions, has sued Connecticut. The federal
government will be arguing that the Connecticut law abridges the rights and
duties of the federal government under what has been known as the U.S.
Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause.”
The Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) establishes that
the U.S. constitution, federal laws, and treaties override all state laws that
conflict with them. It ensures that all state laws, state courts, and state
constitutions must be subordinate to the U.S. Constitution and federal laws and
treaties made by the U.S. government.
Article VI, Clause 2 is not at all ambiguous. It reads: “This
Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in
Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the
Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges
in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or Laws of
any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” Actually, the supremacy clause
predates the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. The Articles of Confederation
provided that "Every State shall abide by the determination of the
[Congress], on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to
them."
Thus far, contending parties have been civil to each other.
No leading states’ rights Democrats in Connecticut have yet pledged to secede
from the union should the case be decided against them. Both sides insist they
are upholding important historical principles, but the discussion presented in
the state’s media so far has elicited a sigh of discontent among those in
Connecticut who sense a needless repetition of events that precipitated the
Civil War.
President Pro Tempore of the State Senate Martin Looney
offered a full throated defense of Connecticut’s updated Trust Act that has
sparked the legal contretemps between the Federal Government and pro-sanctuary
Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly. Looney’s seat in the state legislature will
soon be vacated. Looney announced last May he would not run for reelection. Occupying
a safe seat, he has served in the Connecticut legislature for a record-breaking
46 years, starting in the House in 1980 and the Senate in 1992. Gerrymandering
has been a boon for state Democrats. Looney is generally cited approvingly in
clashes between the increasingly powerful left wing of Connecticut’s hegemonic
Democrat Party and any politician, Republican or Democrat to his right.
This is what Looney said in a recent Hartford Courant story
– “State girds for battle over ICE agents”:
“First of all, I think
that any law that is passed by the state of Connecticut is presumptively
constitutional until a court rules otherwise.
The law we passed is constitutional. It is not something that should be
struck down under the Supremacy Clause. … This is a matter of public safety,
where the state has a significant, historically validated claim to be able to
protect its own people. … The ICE officials are ignoring a presumptively valid
state law. They’re taking the position that the state doesn’t have any
authority to regulate the way they conduct their activities. But we were very
careful in passing the law to make sure that we were not subjecting federal law
enforcement to anything that we do not require of state law enforcement –
masks, physical badges, and ID and all those things. The agency operating ICE inherently
understands that some of what they’re doing is shameful, and that’s why they
don’t want to be identified. It’s an extraordinary thing for people engaged in
law enforcement to think they have to remain anonymous. It means that they
don’t have confidence in the morality of their own mission. FBI agents do not
wear masks. ATF agents — they don’t wear masks, either. Federal marshals who
protect courthouses — they don’t wear masks.”
The operative word in Looney’s statement is “presumptively”,
repeated multiple times in his statement. It is by no means certain that
Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution allows any state government to
abridge the constitutional rights of the federal government. It takes a great
deal of hutzpah to declare that the wearing of masks by ICE law enforcement
officials means that “they don’t have confidence in the morality of their own
mission” or that their mission – to enforce federal immigration laws -- is in
some sense “shameful.” Occam’s razor applied to such a farfetched theory might
easily dispel Looney’s politically opportune misunderstandings
Occum’s Razor --
pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be
posited without necessity”– allows room for reality to overcome, in this case,
political moral posturing. Of two competing theories, the principle holds, we
should give precedence to simplicity; the simpler explanation of an entity is
to be preferred. Federal ICE agents in
the field have often been “docked” by persons less morally astute than Looney.
House Speaker Matt Ritter appears to be on the same page as
Looney, though his assessment is less accusatory and more suave than Looney’s.
This is what Ritter said: “If you look at the law that we passed [the updated Trust Act] ,
adherence to that law is going to avoid the type of situations that we’ve seen
that put not only officers in harm’s way but also people they’re trying to apprehend.
Storming courthouses or hospitals or schools is not going to make people safer,
and I don’t think it’s a good outcome for law enforcement, either,” he said.
“It puts our law enforcement in a tough spot. I think it puts the federal
officers in a tough spot. We should not have people going into those types of
places. They are very sensitive and have long been considered sensitive sites.”
Justice, Aristotle says, lies in treating things that are
the same in a similar manner and things that are different in a different
manner. Both Looney and Ritter, presumably
men of the law, anchor their analysis in a categorical error. Illegal aliens
and U.S. citizens are categorically, from the point of view of the law,
different from each other. Justice requires
that they be treated differently. For instance,
citizens of any country other than the United States should not be permitted to
vote in U.S. elections. Why should a citizen of Venezuela impermissibly residing
in the United States be permitted to vote in U.S. elections?
Anti-ICE crowds are the enforcement mechanisms of the left
in national and state politics. Sometimes violent, the crowds present a threat
to the lives and wellbeing of ICE agents – hence the masks that prevent doxing.
Ritter appears to be arguing that if ICE would foreswear enforcing the nation’s
laws, there would be no disruptions such as occurred recently in Danbury,
Connecticut. True enough, but this is an argument for the repeal of all
reasonable law enforcement and an invitation to social anarchy. Deployed by a
legislator whose principal activity is the creation of laws, this is an
unintentionally amusing line of thought.
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