If Arizona can’t enforce a federal immigration law, does that mean Wisconsinites can now speed on federal highways, smoke crack, and brandish machine guns?

Why not? Using the logic of the U.S. Justice Department, if a Wisconsin sheriff deputy pulls me for a traffic violation and sees a back seat full of banned assault rifles, he can’t ask me to show him a permit for them. That’s ATF’s job.

This silly DOJ lawsuit in Arizona isn’t a principled stand for civil rights; it’s a badly written union grievance.

States enforce federal highway safety laws, federal drug laws, federal firearms laws, a federal drinking age, federal labor laws, federal racketeering laws, federal anti-terrorism laws, and a whole gamut of other federal statutes every single day. Does the President really get to pick and choose which ones will be ignored, and in which states? Won’t that be fun?

How ironic that this administration which mocks the Constitution when it comes to rights of individuals went running for its protection when they felt their own power threatened by the state of Arizona. That’s rich.

It probably has taken all these weeks for them to find a copy of the Constitution in the White House and locate the section on enumerated powers. Libertarians love Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution; it is the government’s job description. That’s where we grant it authority to do a few specific things on our behalf, not that our government pays the slightest attention anymore. We would be thrilled if the Obama administration would adhere to the enumerated powers provisions.

But forgive us if we find it difficult to believe that an administration busy prosecuting two undeclared wars, imposing a national health insurance mandate, implementing a free-speech kill switch, wiretapping citizens without warrants, fixing prices and wages, terminating bondholder contracts without due process, shutting down drill rigs without cause, and intervening in commerce willy-nilly has suddenly discovered a sincere appreciation for the virtue of limited Constitutional government.

The only sincere appreciation discovered by this administration is the sincere appreciation of how deep in the doo-doo they are with fed-up voters. Every runner that makes it across from Mexico is one more Democrat vote when the President creates 12 million more of them by Executive Order of amnesty before the November elections. That’s what this is all about, and you know it.

So now we have come down to this: citizens suing themselves to prevent the prosecution of non-citizens who break the law.

This is an idea that would need a lot of work to be upgraded to stupid. But apparently it made sense to people at the White House, and once again I am compelled to rethink my principled opposition to mandatory workplace drug testing. What’s next – should we sue Louisiana for cleaning the oil off their beaches?

Our immigration laws are a mess, and our border security is pathetic; people are dying and our border States are going bankrupt providing mandated services to people here illegally – $113 billion according to a recent study. All of these are manifestations of too much government and we don’t need more.

Pandering lawsuits and grandstanding boycott resolutions just add more unproductive government busywork and a dose of race-baiting to the recipe unnecessarily.

He was supposed to move us beyond this, remember?

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D. Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.