Obama’s immigration hypocrisy

One of my favorite movie vignettes comes near the end of the classic Western "Tombstone."

Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp visits Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday on his death bed to find a priest administering last rites.

Wyatt looks questioningly at Doc, who lived a life of drinking, gambling, stealing and killing. Doc explains: "It appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds."

That's exactly how President Obama should describe his lawsuit against the good people of the state of Arizona over their attempt to protect themselves from federal government malaise in securing their border with Mexico.

It is, without doubt, hypocrisy unbounded.

Our president -- just like presidents before him -- has failed to secure the border with Mexico, encouraging wide-open drug trade routes to the United States. Americans in border cities are endangered by armed drug runners who think they own the territory and are willing to kill you to prove it. Human smugglers ply their unholy trade virtually unfettered, day and night. So bad is the situation that the federal government now posts a large chunk of Southern Arizona as "no man's land" because of this lawless behavior.

Only the Obama administration would view surrendering American soil to drug cartels as a viable solution, short-term or otherwise.

Yet, when Arizona created a law that proposes to enforce federal immigration law exactly as it is written, the president and his Justice Department suggested Arizonans were racist. Before even reading the law, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder deemed it unconstitutional because it could lead to racial profiling.

And now, last week, the Obama administration filed suit against Arizona, not claiming the potential for racial profiling, but contending that the state law somehow usurps federal immigration authority.

"Although states may exercise their police power in a manner that has an incidental or indirect effect on aliens, a state may not establish its own immigration policy or enforce state laws in a manner that interferes with the federal immigration laws," the Obama complaint reads. "The Constitution and the federal immigration laws do not permit the development of a patchwork of state and local immigration policies throughout the country."

Oh, really? Is there no one at the DOJ who can see the craziness of thinking like that?

First, how can a state law that does nothing more than enforce a federal law "interfere" with federal law?

And while I only play a constitutional lawyer in this newspaper column, it is hard to imagine a federal judge with an ounce of common sense not drop-kicking the Obama lawsuit down the courthouse steps upon the first hearing of that goofy argument.

Second, how does the Obama administration reconcile the argument made against Arizona, while at the same time condone "sanctuary cities"? Some of largest cities in the country call themselves "sanctuary cities" for illegal immigrants, including Obama's home turf, Chicago, and the DOJ's stomping ground of Washington, D.C.

Unlike the Arizona law, these "sanctuary cities" actually do interfere with federal authority on immigration. Yet the DOJ does precisely nothing.

Why?

Well, to answer that, you could begin a long-running commentary on bait-and-switch immigration politics as it applies to 2010 American liberals, like those now embedded in the DOJ.

Or you could cut to the quick and paraphrase what Doc Holliday said in the movie "Tombstone" on his death bed: President Obama's hypocrisy apparently knows no bounds.

Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@reviewjournal.com), is publisher of the Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media.