A Big Win

On Tuesday the SCOTUS struck a huge victory for State’s Rights-

Breitbart-

“The Kansas law had been used to prosecute three illegal aliens who had stolen the social security numbers of other people. The five conservative justices voted to overturn a decision by the liberal-dominated Kansas Supreme Court.

For decades, the ACLU and other liberal attorneys have been pushing the theory that any time Congress passes a law in an area, any state law in the same area that can somehow be imagined to differ with the purposes of Congress is pre-empted and invalid. Using the phrase “purposes and objectives of Congress” pre-emption, they invite activist judges to muse about policy and to strike down state laws that contrast with the unstated policy objectives of Congress. Never mind that the purpose of a law is often unstated. And the 535 members of Congress may have 535 different reasons for their votes.”

Although the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution makes clear that Congress can expressly declare that certain state laws are invalid, the notion that state laws can be invalidated without any express action by Congress is on weaker constitutional footing. It invites judges to do the pre-empting on behalf of Congress.

In the past seventy years, dozens of state laws have been swept away in this manner, without any clear statement from Congress. This has given constitutionalists and conservatives pause. As Justice Clarence Thomas has explained, the Founding Fathers certainly never intended that federal judges could take it upon themselves to speculate about what the purposes of Congress were, and then strike down state laws that are in tension with those purposes. According to Thomas, this theory “impermissibly rests on judicial guesswork about broad federal policy objectives.

This ruling will lay the groundwork  needed to muzzle activist groups and judges at the state level and finally put power back in the hands of voters.