@hawkeye10,
hawkeye10 wrote:You are claiming that Congress under the supremacy clause has the right to do one thing but say another. This is not going to fly. Congress states its objectives when it writes law, if their objectives contradict the law they write then they need to rewrite the law.
Whether you approve or not, the federal government can choose to enforce its own laws with lenience or even decline to enforce them at all. Either way, this choice preempts states from enforcing federal law where the federal government does not.
The Supreme Court affirmed this practice in
American Insurance Institute v. Garamendi. California had enacted a law enforcing insurance claims of Holocaust survivors against German insurance companies. Every party of the case stipulates that the claims themselves were valid. At the same time, however, the Federal government was making a deal with Germany, under which it agreed
not to enforce those insurance claims under US law. (Instead, German insurers passed the hat around among themselves, and the claims were paid out of that hat.)
The Supreme Court struck down California's law under the US constitution's Supremacy Clause: "The basic fact is that California seeks to use an iron fist where the President has consistently chosen kid gloves. We have heard powerful arguments that the iron fist would work better [...]. But our thoughts on the efficacy of the one approach versus the other are beside the point, since our business is not to judge the wisdom of the National Government’s policy; dissatisfaction should be addressed to the President or, perhaps, Congress. The question relevant to preemption in this case is conflict, and the evidence here is 'more than sufficient to demonstrate that the state Act stands in the way of [the President’s] diplomatic objectives.' "
The analogy with Arizona's interference with US immigration policy is close.
