Less than a month after the Supreme Court heard three days of arguments over President Obama’s health care law, the justices on Wednesday will consider another major politically charged case about the scope of federal power, this one concerning Arizona’s aggressive 2010 immigration law.
The argument is a rematch between the main protagonists in last month’s case. Paul D. Clement, who argued for the 26 states challenging the health care law, represents Arizona. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. again represents the federal government.
In their briefs, the two lawyers presented sharply contrasting accounts of what the Arizona law meant to achieve. Mr. Clement said the state was making an effort to address “an emergency situation” marked by “rampant illegal entries and cross-border smuggling.” The state law, he said, complemented federal immigration policy and was “a perfectly valid example of cooperative law enforcement.”
Mr. Verrilli countered that Arizona’s approach was in conflict with the federal efforts and would “supplant federal policy with a new and contrary state policy.” The state law, he wrote, “cannot be sustained as an exercise in cooperative federalism when its very design discards cooperation and embraces confrontation.”
The Arizona law, sometimes called S.B. 1070, advances what it calls a policy of “attrition through enforcement,” and it has been something of a trendsetter. It was followed by similar and sometimes harsher laws in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah. All have been subject to court challenges, and lower courts have blocked some of their provisions.
