U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) defended her home state Wednesday against what she called “the Trump Administration’s brazen aggression and intimidation tactics,” after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions filed a lawsuit to have California’s “sanctuary state” statutes declared unconstitutional.
The Trump administration claims that the three laws — the Immigrant Worker Protection Act (HB 450), the Inspection and Review of Facilities Housing Federal Detainees law (AB 103); and the California Values Act (SB 54) — all violate the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which states that federal law “shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”
The laws are designed to restrict state and local law enforcement cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. The Trump administration argues that states cannot block federal law in the area of immigration, which is one of federal jurisdiction.
As commentator Byron York of the Washington Examiner noted, the Trump administration is merely using the same arguments successfully used by the Obama administration in 2010 when it challenged Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 law, which allowed state and local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration law.
At the time, then-Speaker of the House Pelosi applauded the Supreme Court’s decision to have most of the Arizona law declared unconstitutional.
Polls indicate that Pelosi is in a good position to reclaim her old job, as Democrats need only win 24 House seats in the 2018 midterm elections to reclaim their majority.
Pelosi was among many prominent California Democrats who condemned Sessions’s lawsuit on Tuesday and Wednesday. Governor Jerry Brown said that the Trupm administration was “going to war against the state of California.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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