Separation of Powers and Federalism

By Philip A. Kretsedemas, an associate professor of sociology at The University of Massachusetts Boston

For the past two years, the national debate over police involvement in immigration enforcement has focused on Arizona Senate Bill 1070. When it was first enacted, SB 1070 was widely criticized for the broad discretion it allowed Arizona police to question people about their legal status. Much of this criticism focused on the problem of immigrant racial profiling. Opponents of the bill argued that it opened the door for the indiscriminate interrogation of anyone who looks like an unauthorized migrant.

Even though these complaints figured prominently in the public debate over SB 1070, it is rather telling that they have dropped out of the legal arguments that have been marshaled against the bill. One reason for this curious situation is that complaints about racial profiling and selective enforcement have historically been framed as violations of Fourth Amendment rights. But it also so happens that the legal challenge against SB 1070 is being led by the Department of Justice which, for obvious reasons, is not interested in setting legal precedents that would limit the search and seizure power of the police. The Supreme Court, which is currently deliberating over the DOJ's lawsuit against SB 1070, also has a history of favoring the discretionary powers of law enforcement over Fourth Amendment considerations.

It is important to keep this context in mind when evaluating the legal arguments that are being levied against SB 1070. The DOJ is advancing a finely pitched argument which takes issue with the law making powers of local governments but not the search and seizure practices of law enforcement. It is also bears noting that the DOJ is not opposing local immigration laws on principle. The DOJ supported Arizona's employer sanctions law (penalizing businesses that hire unauthorized migrants) which was subsequently upheld by the 9th Circuit and Supreme Court. The federal government also doesn't seem to be opposed, on principle, to the involvement of police in enforcing federal immigration laws. The Obama administration has actually given state and local police new opportunities to enforce immigration laws. It has only taken issue with local enforcement practices that operate outside of the federal-local enforcement arrangements that have already been authorized by federal law.

By David J. Bodenhamer, executive director of The Polis Center and a professor of history at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

When addressing the Harvard Law School Association in 1913, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. worried that “that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law.”  His corrective was simple: “It seems to be at this time that we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.” Although Holmes was speaking about socialism and judges he deemed “naïf and simple-minded,” his admonition seems equally appropriate for our own constitutionally contentious era. Of course, bitter disputes over the meaning of the Constitution are nothing new; they have been a hallmark of public discourse since the 39 signing delegates left Philadelphia. So other than a reminder that controversy and division are common to our history, what “education in the obvious” do we require today?

We too often forget that the Constitution is a revolutionary document. It embodied a fundamental re-scripting of assumptions about government. Chief among them was the invention of popular sovereignty, a conception of the people as both rulers and ruled, or as John Jay noted, “sovereigns without subjects” who “had none to govern but themselves.” This concept was necessary to accommodate another innovation, federalism, which James Madison acknowledged was “unprecedented … It stands by itself.” But it was the only way to resolve the inconsistency of imperium in imperio, a sovereignty within a sovereignty. Over two centuries, these solutions, radical for their time (and for ours), have been instrumental in the development of a more democratic and egalitarian nation because once marginalized and excluded groups demanded to be counted among the people who ruled themselves. And they usually succeeded first in the states, Brandeis’s famed “laboratories of democracy,” before the nation-at-large accepted their claims. But as often happens with revolutionary legacies, there is a counter-narrative to this progressive story. The inventions of popular sovereignty and federalism also have produced great mischief: they have offered a veneer of legitimacy to a variety of “isms”— racism, nativism, separatism, and the like — that acted to deny liberty rather than advance it.