By Dan McLaughlin
Thursday, May 07, 2020
The Supreme Court is often divided on ideological lines
on hot-button issues, and tends to write unanimously when dealing with
procedural questions where a lower court just went off the rails. So, when the
Court takes a unanimous stand in a case involving a controversial political
issue and goes out of its way to dress down the lower-court judges, you know
they really went overboard. That’s what happened this morning in an immigration
case, United States
v. Sineneng-Smith. Justice Ginsburg herself delivered the lecture to
the Ninth Circuit to knock off the antics and stick to the cases before it.
The Sineneng-Smith case involved an immigration
consultant who made $3.3 million from clients (mostly Philippine immigrants) by
filing applications for lawful permanent residence when she knew they were not
legally entitled to that status. There were two potential victims here: the
immigrants, if they paid for something they were never going to receive, or the
government, if it approved illegal applications. Sieneneng-Smith tried to make
herself more sympathetic by arguing that she was only scamming the immigration
system: She “argued that labor-certification applications were often approved
despite expiration of the statutory dispensation, and that an approved
application, when submitted as part of a petition for adjustment of status,
would place her clients in line should Congress reactivate the dispensation.”
Neither of these was an argument that her clients had any legal leg to stand
on, just hope that they might get away with it.
Sineneng-Smith argued that she had a First Amendment
right to file bogus applications, under the Petition and Free Speech Clauses.
When her appeal reached the Ninth Circuit, however, it landed before notorious
liberal activist judge Stephen Reinhardt (who died after the case was argued,
and has since been the subject of other
controversies), on a three-judge panel with two Clinton appointees, judges
Marsha Berzon and Wallace Tashima. Instead of hearing the arguments
Sineneng-Smith made against her conviction, the judges thought up their own
argument — that the federal statute against “encourag[ing] or induc[ing] an
alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless
disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in
violation of law” is itself overbroad and should be thrown out in its entirety.
The Ninth Circuit panel brought in three lawyers to make
friend-of-the-court arguments against the whole statute, and — after Judge
Reinhardt died and was replaced on the panel by an Obama appointee — ruled
that it was unconstitutional because Congress cannot criminalize
encouraging people to break the law unless the law involved is a criminal
statute: “even if certain speech would constitute aiding and abetting when
directed toward the commission of a crime, it would be constitutionally
protected when aimed at inducing a civil violation of law . . . unauthorized
presence in the country is a civil violation rather than a crime.” The Ninth
Circuit said that this could chill protected speech such as “an attorney who
tells her client that she should remain in the country while contesting
removal” — an obviously different situation from knowingly advising abuse of
the legal process. (Justice Thomas, in a concurring opinion today, suggested
that the overbreadth doctrine relied on by the Ninth Circuit should itself be
revisited another day “in an appropriate case,” precisely because it gets
courts into the business of deciding hypothetical cases). Sineneng-Smith and
some of the amicus briefs even asked
the Ninth Circuit to rule that it was discriminatory to criminalize encouraging
people to break the law, but not criminalize discouraging them from breaking the law. Only in immigration cases
would this kind of thing get argued in court.
For Justice Ginsburg and the rest of the Court, the rogue
judicial effort to bring down the entire statute without having been asked by
the parties to the case went too far:
In the ensuing do over of the
appeal, counsel for the parties were assigned a secondary role . . . Courts are essentially passive instruments
of government. They do not, or should not, sally forth each day looking for
wrongs to right. They wait for cases
to come to them, and when cases arise, courts normally decide only questions
presented by the parties . . . No extraordinary circumstances justified the
panel’s takeover of the appeal. Sineneng-Smith herself had raised a vagueness
argument and First Amendment arguments homing in on her own conduct, not that
of others . . . a court is not hidebound by the precise arguments of counsel,
but the Ninth Circuit’s radical
transformation of this case goes well beyond the pale. [Emphasis added;
quotations and citations omitted.]
Rather than decide the legal issues, the Court sent the
whole thing back to the Ninth Circuit with instructions to hear the appeal over
again, this time in a process “bearing a fair resemblance to the case shaped by
the parties.” Ouch. Judges tempted to make political statements and rewrite the
law, rather than hear and decide the cases in front of them, should take
notice.
No comments:
Post a Comment