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The matter has not yet been decided in court, but there assuredly will be winners and losers.
The U.S. Federal government, its back put against the wall by a Connecticut law that questions the authority of the federal government to operate in certain Connecticut jurisdictions, has sued Connecticut. The federal government will be arguing that the Connecticut law abridges the rights and duties of the federal government under what has been known as the U.S. Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause.”
The Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) establishes that the U.S. constitution, federal laws, and treaties override all state laws that conflict with them. It ensures that all state laws, state courts, and state constitutions must be subordinate to the U.S. Constitution and federal laws and treaties made by the U.S. government.
Article VI, Clause 2 is not at all ambiguous. It reads: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” Actually, the supremacy clause predates the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. The Articles of Confederation provided that “Every State shall abide by the determination of the [Congress], on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to them.”
Thus far, contending parties have been civil to each other. No leading states’ rights Democrats in Connecticut have yet pledged to secede from the union should the case be decided against them. Both sides insist they are upholding important historical principles, but the discussion presented in the state’s media so far has elicited a sigh of discontent among those in Connecticut who sense a needless repetition of events that precipitated the Civil War.
President Pro Tempore of the State Senate Martin Looney offered a full-throated defense of Connecticut’s updated Trust Act that has sparked the legal contretemps between the Federal Government and pro-sanctuary Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly. Looney’s seat in the state legislature will soon be vacated. Looney announced last May he would not run for reelection. Occupying a safe seat, he has served in the Connecticut legislature for a record-breaking 46 years, starting in the House in 1980 and the Senate in 1992. Gerrymandering has been a boon for state Democrats. Looney is generally cited approvingly in clashes between the increasingly powerful left wing of Connecticut’s hegemonic Democrat Party and any politician, Republican or Democrat to his right.
This is what Looney said in a recent Hartford Courant story – “State girds for battle over ICE agents”:
“First of all, I think that any law that is passed by the state of Connecticut is presumptively constitutional until a court rules otherwise. The law we passed is constitutional. It is not something that should be struck down under the Supremacy Clause. … This is a matter of public safety, where the state has a significant, historically validated claim to be able to protect its own people. … The ICE officials are ignoring a presumptively valid state law. They’re taking the position that the state doesn’t have any authority to regulate the way they conduct their activities. But we were very careful in passing the law to make sure that we were not subjecting federal law enforcement to anything that we do not require of state law enforcement – masks, physical badges, and ID and all those things. The agency operating ICE inherently understands that some of what they’re doing is shameful, and that’s why they don’t want to be identified. It’s an extraordinary thing for people engaged in law enforcement to think they have to remain anonymous. It means that they don’t have confidence in the morality of their own mission. FBI agents do not wear masks. ATF agents — they don’t wear masks, either. Federal marshals who protect courthouses — they don’t wear masks.”
The operative word in Looney’s statement is “presumptively”, repeated multiple times in his statement. It is by no means certain that Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution allows any state government to abridge the constitutional rights of the federal government. It takes a great deal of hutzpah to declare that the wearing of masks by ICE law enforcement officials means that “they don’t have confidence in the morality of their own mission” or that their mission – to enforce federal immigration laws -- is in some sense “shameful.” Occam’s razor applied to such a farfetched theory might easily dispel Looney’s politically opportune misunderstandings
Occum’s Razor -- pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity”– allows room for reality to overcome, in this case, political moral posturing. Of two competing theories, the principle holds, we should give precedence to simplicity; the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. Federal ICE agents in the field have often been “doxxed” by persons less morally astute than Looney.
House Speaker Matt Ritter appears to be on the same page as Looney, though his assessment is less accusatory and more suave than Looney’s.
This is what Ritter said: “If you look at the law that we passed [the updated Trust Act] , adherence to that law is going to avoid the type of situations that we’ve seen that put not only officers in harm’s way but also people they’re trying to apprehend. Storming courthouses or hospitals or schools is not going to make people safer, and I don’t think it’s a good outcome for law enforcement, either,” he said. “It puts our law enforcement in a tough spot. I think it puts the federal officers in a tough spot. We should not have people going into those types of places. They are very sensitive and have long been considered sensitive sites.”
Justice, Aristotle says, lies in treating things that are the same in a similar manner and things that are different in a different manner. Both Looney and Ritter, presumably men of the law, anchor their analysis in a categorical error. Illegal aliens and U.S. citizens are categorically, from the point of view of the law, different from each other. Justice requires that they be treated differently. For instance, citizens of any country other than the United States should not be permitted to vote in U.S. elections. Why should a citizen of Venezuela impermissibly residing in the United States be permitted to vote in U.S. elections?
Anti-ICE crowds are the enforcement mechanisms of the left in national and state politics. Sometimes violent, the crowds present a threat to the lives and wellbeing of ICE agents – hence the masks that prevent doxing. Ritter appears to be arguing that if ICE would foreswear enforcing the nation’s laws, there would be no disruptions such as occurred recently in Danbury, Connecticut. True enough, but this is an argument for the repeal of all reasonable law enforcement and an invitation to social anarchy. Deployed by a legislator whose principal activity is the creation of laws, this is an unintentionally amusing line of thought.
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Just how does Mr. Looney presume that “any law that is passed by the state of Connecticut is constitutional until a [woke] court rules otherwise.“?
Mr. Looney presumes it because, like much of CT's male population, he has thoroughly surrendured to the feminine qualities of fairness and equality and security and inclusivity (which direct, rather, compromise his judgment) and checked both his testicles and his responsibility at the door.
The real civil war.