In 2023, Texas enacted its Senate Bill 4, which
makes illegal entry into Texas a state crime. It gives Texas law enforcement the authority to return illegal foreign nationals to a port of entry and/or arrest them for unlawful entry, among other provisions.
Governor Greg Abbott (R) justified the law on the basis of the Biden administration’s open borders policy which required Texas to act on its national Constitution Art I, Sect 10 obligation to resist the functional invasion that resulted. Progressive groups promptly sued.
Last Friday, the 5th Circuit upheld that law. That was the correct answer, but the court did it for the wrong reason, so the critical underlying question remains unaddressed.
On Friday, the court issued a 12-page ruling solely on procedural grounds, arguing the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue. It didn’t address the merits of the claims.
This ruling, avoiding as it does the constitutionally important question that was raised by the suit, is badly flawed. That question is this: does a State have the right (much less the obligation) to enforce its own border with another country when it believes the Federal government is not enforcing that same border, and material harm to the State and to its citizens result?
Chief Justice John Mashalll writing for the Court in 1803’s Marbury v Madison, made all judges’ obligations crystalline:
It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.
To say what the law is, to speak up, not to avoid that duty by deflecting on procedural grounds.
That’s not to say judges should never consider questions of standing or other procedure; that way lies tons of fee-seekers bringing cases without regard to necessary procedure. As the 5th Circuit wrote,
Federal courts have a solemn responsibility to apply neutral principles, such as standing, to the cases that come before them and must resist the temptation to confer Article III standing any time an advocacy group or political subdivision challenges a law it passionately dislikes.
But the province and duty of judges does require them to say what the law is and to act on that saying. Doing so need not automatically confer Article III standing for every case concerning a passionately disliked issue. The Supreme Court has begun applying the Major Questions Doctrine to cases involving the limits of Executive Branch power vs the Legislative Branch’s. The Court needs to apply a similar Major Controversies Doctrine to its decisions regarding whether a case’s core question is more or less important than the specifics of procedure in that case.
The 5th Circuit’s ruling can be read here.