Finally, A Kind Of Pre-Emption The Left Can Love

Two words, ladies and gentlemen - "Democrat appointee":

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the most controversial parts of Arizona's immigration law from taking effect, delivering a last-minute victory to opponents of the crackdown.

The overall law will still take effect Thursday, but without the provisions that angered opponents — including sections that required officers to check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws.

The judge also put on hold parts of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, and made it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled that those sections should be put on hold until the courts resolve the issues. Other provisions of the law, many of them procedural and slight revisions to existing Arizona immigration statute, will go into effect at 12:01 a.m.

..."There is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens under the new (law)," Bolton ruled. "By enforcing this statute, Arizona would impose a 'distinct, unusual and extraordinary' burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose."

First, allow me (and Ed Morrissey) to bend over for DrewM:

Lesson reiterated...never read too much into what questions a judge asks at a hearing for clues about how they will rule.

Second, the common thread of Judge Bolton's injunction ruling does not apply the law to this case, but bends the law to the Hussein regime's ludicrous pre-emption argument:

The Arizona law is completely consistent with federal law. The judge, however, twisted the concept of federal law into federal enforcement practices [i.e. policy] (or, as it happens, lack thereof). In effect, the court is saying that if the feds refuse to enforce the law the states can’t do it either because doing so would transgress the federal policy of non-enforcement … which is nuts.

The judge also employs a cute bit of sleight-of-hand. She repeatedly invokes a 1941 case, Hines v. Davidowitz, in which the Supreme Court struck down a state alien-registration statute. In Hines, the high court reasoned that the federal government had traditionally followed a policy of not treating aliens as “a thing apart,” and that Congress had therefore “manifested a purpose … to protect the liberties of law-abiding aliens through one uniform national system” that would not unduly subject them to “inquisitorial practices and police surveillance.” But the Arizona law is not directed at law-abiding aliens in order to identify them as foreigners and subject them, on that basis, to police attention. It is directed at arrested aliens who are in custody because they have violated the law. And it is not requiring them to register with the state; it is requiring proof that they have properly registered with the federal government — something a sensible federal government would want to encourage.

Judge Bolton proceeds from this misapplication of Hines to the absurd conclusion that Arizona can’t ask the federal government for verification of the immigration status of arrestees — even though federal law prohibits the said arrestees from being in the country unless they have legal status — because that would tremendously burden the feds, which in turn would make the arrestees wait while their status is being checked, which would result in the alien arrestees being treated like “a thing apart.”  

Returning from the "legal weeds," this was not an application of law but a political ruling directed at no other purpose but enabling the ruling junta to slap down a rebellious state that takes federal immigration law far more seriously than the feds do.  More McCarthy:

This decision is going to anger most of the country. The upshot of it is to tell Americans that if they want the immigration laws enforced, they are going to need a president willing to do it, a Congress willing to make clear that the federal government has no interest in preempting state enforcement, and the selection of judges who will not invent novel legal theories to frustrate enforcement.

Eeyore:

No matter how many lawsuits the state loses and no matter what grounds it may lose on, the takeaway for most of the public will be that the federal government is now actually using the courts to prevent enforcement of its own immigration laws. Which means that every legal step, regardless of the outcome, is a political win for border enforcement. Arizona’s law was never going to stop border crossings on its own, but the angrier voters get at seeing the feds side with illegals in court, the greater the pressure will be on Congress to take serious enforcement measures along the entire border

And since, as McCarthy notes, voters will never, EVER get serious border enforcement from the Obama/Pelosi/Reid Axis, that will mean a electing a Republican Congress in 2010 and a Republican president in 2012.  Outcomes that Judge Bolton just helped make even more likely.

Governor Jan Brewer gets the last word: