Playing at Court
Continuing the NaBloPoMo theme of play, we come to this article from Politico, of a judge playing at Constitutional Expert:
Ariz. Gov. slams ‘foreign interference’
In a new twist in the fight over Arizona’s immigration law, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer on Tuesday asked a federal court to disallow foreign governments from joining the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit to overturn the law.
The move comes in response to a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling issued Monday, allowing nearly a dozen Latin American countries — Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru and Chile — to submit friend-of-the-court briefs in Justice’s challenge to SB 1070, which Brewer signed into law in April and is considered one of the nation’s toughest immigration-enforcement measures.
I must be the only one who reads the Constitution these days. The case is USA vs. State of Arizona, No. 10-16645. It started in the US District Court for AZ and is now in the 9th Circus, which is what puzzles me. It should have started in the Supreme Court, because according to Article III, Section 2, clause 2:
In all Cases … in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned [in Art. III Sec. 2, clause 1 - MSM], the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.
Now, my lawyer friends will point me to this brief in which some lawyers try to argue that the district court has jurisdiction under US Code, chapter 28, sections 1331 and 1345, to which I would reply that they didn’t bother to read the above mentioned Article III. The “as the Congress shall make” provision applies only to the cases mentioned in Clause 1, not those mentioned in Clause 2. If Congress can decide which cases go to which courts based on a whim, regardless of what’s specified in the Constitution, then it is one more piece of evidence that the Constitution really is just a piece of paper, irrelevant to how we govern ourselves. If we are supposed to be living under the Constitution, then we must start abiding by it, or stop telling ourselves it is supreme.
What am I missing? Is the Constitution supreme or not? Am I reading it correctly? If not, why is it so easily misunderstood?