The SB4 lawsuit that Ken Paxton filed, to get the law pre-emptively declared to be constitutional, had its hearing in Austin on Thursday.
A federal judge on Thursday criticized the politics surrounding Texas’ new immigration-enforcement law and hinted that he’d be unable to take the case over from his colleague in Bexar County.
U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks told attorneys for the state of Texas that he had a docket twice as busy as San Antonio-based Orlando Garcia after he was asked by the state to declare Austin the appropriate venue for what’s gearing up to be a lengthy court battle over Senate bill 4.
[…]
“San Antonio has a track record of evidence that Judge Garcia can take into consideration,” Sparks said, referring to a seven-hour hearing on Monday in San Antonio where attorneys for both sides argued over the legality of allowing state governments to enforce federal immigration laws. He added that he has a trial scheduled in August that could likely spill into September.
Thursday’s hearing was a dramatic shift from Monday’s display, where Garcia sat largely silent and appeared to take every motion, argument and counter-argument into consideration. Sparks instead often interrupted the attorneys and repeated what he said should be simple questions to answer when the attorneys strayed off topic. He also hinted that he believed parties that joined the lawsuit against the state did so for political purposes.
“The city of Austin just got in because it’s political and they get a lot of advertisement” [in the press], he said.
[…]
The judge also cast doubt on whether any court would be able to declare a law constitutional when it hasn’t gone into effect yet.
“I don’t have the authority to forecast the future and you have a statute that doesn’t come into effect until September,” he told David Hacker, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office.
Sparks didn’t give a time line on when he’d rule on the motion to move the case to Austin.
See here and here for the background. I’m sure there was a good helping of politics in the various cities’ and counties’ decisions to pile onto the anti_SB4 lawsuit, but then SB4 itself was all about politics. Based on the things Judge Sparks said during the hearing, I’d prefer he leave the San Antonio lawsuit be rather than combine it with the Paxton lawsuit. At least he doesn’t seem inclined to take any action before the law is scheduled to go into effect. The Statesman and the DMN have more.
Hey, Kuff:
This really needs a discussion here. Most of the states that successfully sued Obama to stop DAPA are now going after DACA, using the exact same legal reasoning. Texas is one of those states.
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/880515732257296385
This suit should be successful, and should force Congress to either do something, or do nothing, which in itself is doing something.
When a party no longer has ideas it pushes hate, the party of Trump is now the party of ignorant racist bigot haters. Three groups they will target Latinos, Muslims, and LGBT.