Developments in Immigration Law. Also, too: Tax Cuts!

I hear that Mike Pence is boldly proposing tax cuts as part of his campaign platform. Groundbreaking! He should probably talk to the local governments and school districts that have been squeezed hard over the last few years, the government pension fund managers, and our creditors at the federal government to whom we owe something like $2 billion in unemployment insurance loans. They might point out a number of ways in which the State’s “surplus” which will fund these tax cuts are illusory.

Back in the real world, it appears that Attorney General Greg Zoeller (about whom, despite being castigated as a partisan liberal by my detractors, I have few complaints) has announced that, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Arizona immigration law, the AG’s office can no longer defend large chunks of Indiana’s own immigration law.

Indiana’s top lawyer has recommended a federal judge strike down parts of Indiana’s immigration law in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision that Arizona provisions dealing with warrantless arrests are unconstitutional.

“The Supreme Court made clear that immigration enforcement is a federal government responsibility,” Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller said in a statement.

Zoeller filed the brief with the U.S. District Court which has been considering whether Indiana’s law — passed in 2011 but never fully enforced — is constitutional.

Zoeller said Tuesday key parts of the law “cannot be defended” under the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The District Court had issued a preliminary injunction on parts of the immigration law back in June 2011. As I said then:

When the Democrats boycotted the General Assembly, we were treated to a lot of faulty analogies about how, if this were private business and those guys didn’t show up for work, they’d get fired. Well, in the wake of two court rulings finding big Constitutional problems with two major pieces of legislation, we can add another. If workers in private business were producing this much defective product, exposing their employers to lawsuits, they’d also get fired.