I’ll delve more deeply into this ruling in the coming days, but for now let me summarize thusly: the citizens of Arizona don’t have a public interest in protecting their state from those who come there to knowingly violate their laws, i.e. criminals. Here’s a link to a brief description of Judge Bolton’s ruling, which clocks in at just under forty pages, by the New York Times. There are a lot of areas to address here, but it basically boils down to a single federal judge gutting the toughest provisions of SB 1070-at least, for the time being. That being said, there remain several key aspects of the law that will be implemented this coming thursday, per Fox News.
I was disappointed, but certainly not shocked, at Judge Bolton’s ruling. That said, it is merely a preliminary injunction, while the cases are being adjudicated by the federal courts. Even the ruling itself is being appealed, and could be overturned long before the actual cases wend their way through the federal court system, likely ending up in the Supreme Court itself. The (frankly) hyperbolic reaction in some quarters– calling for the impeachment of a federal judge for merely issuing a preliminary injunction, as requested by the Attorney General of the United States!– just goes to show that partisans on both sides of the divide are far more interested in winning what they seek than in seeing that the rule of law, both procedural and substantive, plays itself out in the federal courts, where it belongs to be settled in this nation (supposedly) of laws and not (wo)men.