- Click here for ScotusBlog's page on it.
Here's what's at issue:
(1) Whether a state that voluntarily provides a subsidy to all aliens with deferred action has Article III standing and a justiciable cause of action under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to challenge the Secretary of Homeland Security’s guidance seeking to establish a process for considering deferred action for certain aliens because it will lead to more aliens having deferred action; (2) whether the guidance is arbitrary and capricious or otherwise not in accordance with law; (3) whether the guidance was subject to the APA’s notice-and-comment procedures; and (4) whether the guidance violates the Take Care Clause of the Constitution, Article II, section 3.
Here's Denniston's preview:
In many ways, the case of United States v. Texas illustrates much about the current political climate in America and in the nation’s capital, in particular. It reflects gridlock, partisan polarization, and the use of sometimes imaginative lawsuits to pursue political or policy agendas. It is a modern echo of what the Founders debated with great intensity: how to divide up the powers of national and state governments. But this dispute’s pure political content is a product of the modern era’s partisan warfare, the stubborn refusal to compromise in order to get something done, even in very important fields of policy.
President Obama and Congress have not been able to put together a comprehensive new immigration policy, and so the president has opted to make unusual uses of claimed executive authority. His government’s November 2014 orders would put off, for three years and perhaps longer, the compelled deportation of upwards of four million undocumented immigrants, some of whom came to the country illegally and others who had permission to enter but overstayed and lost that status. Most of them are parents of children who have a legal right to remain. The parents would not gain U.S. citizenship, but would be allowed to remain in the country without legal status and could get a job and access to public benefits, such as driver’s licenses.
The legal fight was brought on by states where Republicans dominate the governments, and where the idea of suing the national government over policy disputes has grown more and more popular. United States v. Texas is as much a part of those efforts as have been the repeated courthouse challenges to Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act), with states playing major roles in those cases, too.
