U.S. discounts constitutional issue on immigration

[Draggingtree]

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By Lyle Denniston on Jan 5, 2016 at 6:27 pm

The Obama administration used only a brief footnote in a new filing at the Supreme Court to try to steer the Justices away from ruling on the constitutionality of President Obama’s year-old policy to postpone deportation of more than four million undocumented immigrants. Choosing to file a reply to the twenty-six states’ brief filed a week ago in United States v. Texas, administration lawyers sought to dismiss the constitutional challenges as mere repetition of points the states have sought to make under federal immigration laws.

 

The government document said that the states were seeking to “inject a constitutional question into the case,” because neither of the two lower courts that had upheld temporarily the states’ challenge had said anything about constitutionality. The constitutional issues the states want to raise, if the Court agrees to hear the government’s appeal, have “no independent content,” the new filing argued.