It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The Biden administration had a rough day in court.
And that’s because Joe Biden got hit with a Supreme Court smackdown that no one saw coming.
SCOTUS smacks down POTUS
Texas and Louisiana brought their legal challenges over the Biden administration not enforcing federal immigration laws to the Supreme Court.
At issue was a 2021 memo from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas ordering federal agents to consider the totality of an illegal alien’s threat to public safety, instead of automatically deporting them following an arrest for certain crimes as outlined by a 1996 law.
Louisiana and Texas filed a lawsuit arguing that the administration did not comply with the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and failed to lay out convincing reasoning as to why this policy was necessary.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar encountered some surprising resistance from Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson due to a “conceptual problem” she had with the administration’s argument.
“The conceptual problem that I’m having with your argument [is] you point to text, context and history, and I understand those things, but ordinarily, there’s a symmetry between a claim that has been made in a case and the remedy that is provided to a successful plaintiff,” Jackson began.
Jackson explained that the administration’s reading of the APA was completely disconnected from the reality of the text.
“The way that you are reading this actually creates a disconnect for me,” Jackson added. “Here’s what I mean: It is clear that the claim under the APA is about the manner in which the agency has exercised its discretion. And we know that agencies have no inherent authority. They get all of their power to make valid and legally binding policies from Congress. And Congress has said in the APA that in order to make valid and legally binding policies, agencies have to follow certain procedures.”
Jackson complained that the administration was claiming that if Texas and Louisiana won the case, then they would be the only states in America that could deport illegal aliens convicted of crimes.
“So when a plaintiff is making a claim under the APA, they’re complaining about the agency’s failure to follow the procedures that are necessary in order to reach a valid and legally binding result. Given that that’s the case, I think there’s a disconnect to say that the successful plaintiff only gets a remedy that is about the application of that rule to them,” Jackson continued.
The argument is illogical
Jackson pointed out the illogical nature of the administration’s argument, which claimed that even if the Court ruled the administration imposed an illegal order on deportations, then it should be able to apply that same illegal order to the other 48 states.
“Their complaint is that the agency did not have the authority to do what it did because it didn’t follow the procedures under the APA,” Jackson stated. “It is as though they’re saying what the agency did is void . . . because they did not follow the procedures that Congress required. So I just don’t even understand — setting aside, like, how you read the statute to get to that result — it seems to me to not make sense to say that the remedy is to allow the agency to apply its void, defective rule to anyone else who’s not the plaintiff.”
Joe Biden’s open borders agenda is so far off the rails that not even the Justice he installed on the Supreme Court bought the administration’s tortured legal arguments.
