A federal judge gets one real, real right

An encouraging development in a world that could use a few:

A federal judge in Texas has blocked President Barack Obama’s unilateral and unpopular November plan to award work permits to four million illegal immigrants, starting this week.

The late-night injunction will scramble the Senate’s immigration stand-off, and could help conservative Republicans push confident Democrats on the defensive — if it is not quickly reversed by appeals court judges.

The lawsuit was filed by 26 states, and is expected to be decided by the Supreme Court in 2016.

The reasoning looks solid to me:

The 123-page judgement ruled that Obama’s November amnesty violated the Administrative Procedure Act by ignoring Congress’s laws.
The amnesty also improperly imposed burdens on the states,  ruled Judge Andrew S. Hanen, of the Federal District Court in Brownsville. ”The court finds that the government’s failure to secure the border has exacerbated illegal immigration into this country. … The record supports the finding that this lack of enforcement, combined with the country’s high rate of illegal immigration, significantly drains the states’ resources.”
Hanen was nominated in 2002 by then-President George W. Bush.
The injunction is needed, Hanen declared, to stall the amnesty while the lawsuit is debated by various appeals courts.

“The court agrees … any subsequent ruling that finds DAPA unlawful after it is implemented would result in the states facing the substantially difficult — if not impossible — task of retracting benefits or licenses already provided” to beneficiaries, he wrote. 

Of course, the regime has gone right to work on a way to dispute this on legal grounds.  Should be interesting to see what the sovereignty-haters come up with.