Chamorro Savings Time*

I really wasn't going to write about the lawsuit. (Saipan Tribune and Marianas Variety) The Department of Homeland Security still takes over 'after midnight' tonight. Most of the contract workers will still have to be gone in five years. So, what's changed by District Court Judge Paul Friedman's preliminary injunction?

There are no interim rules. We just get the full U.S. immigration package. The CNMI argued, persuasively to me, that DHS didn't follow the Administrative Procedures Act. Okay, the judge said, follow them: propose regulations, give an adequate comment period, consider the comments and then promulgate final rules.

It's like Daylight Savings Time: we can push time back, but only for a few months.

"The commonwealth will continue to operate under its existing labor system except for entry and exit," volunteered part-time attorney Deanne Siemer. Umm. No. We just won't have interim rules to soften the transition yet.

In one of this lawsuit's strange twists, Friedman writes that "The CNMI maintains that the Commonwealth’s guest worker population currently is experiencing high rates of unemployment, and that employers are consequently unlikely to require permits for new guest workers in the near future. Reply at 20-21. Consequently, the United States cannot argue with any degree of certainty that CNMI employers will be harmed by the issuance of a preliminary injunction in this matter."

Got that? Everybody's in limbo. If there are problems, Friedman writes, "To assist either foreign workers seeking to leave and return to the CNMI or employers desperately in need of workers from outside the Commonwealth, DHS may, if necessary, promulgate a narrowly focused and temporary emergency regulation that addresses only the problem at hand."

That's a far cry from Siemer's formulation that "Friedman also virtually commanded DHS to come up with an emergency regulation allowing aliens in the commonwealth to travel in and out."

Rhetorical question: what substantive changes do you expect to see when we get the final regulations?

("The CNMI maintains that the Commonwealth’s guest worker population currently is experiencing high rates of unemployment.")

* I'm not forgetting my Carolinian friends. It's just that I couldn't pass up the word play on Chamorro Standard Time.

A boy named sue

Nobody should be surprised that Gov. Benigno R. Fitial has filed his lawsuit against the federal government -- the move's been obvious since he first proposed it in his State of the Commonwealth Address and he consistently ignores anybody but his dwindling inner circle.

Former Office of Insular Affairs Deputy Assistant Secretary David Cohen puts it succinctly in the Saipan Tribune:

Moreover, while the lawsuit “tries to argue that the CNMI is being singled out with special restrictions that do not apply to any other community in the U.S,” the truth “is exactly the opposite. The CNMI is receiving special benefits that no other community receives under U.S. immigration law.”

I've written that before, but the Counselor does it so well. Another of my points he says better:

The governor, he added, “is essentially asking the court for protection because he’s afraid that the federal agencies will, in the future, ignore their duties under the new law and not implement it properly. Any court worth its salt would tell the governor to wait and give the feds a chance to do their jobs properly. You can’t sue public officials in advance for possible future misdeeds. You have to wait to see if those misdeeds actually occur.”

This Lone Ranger approach is arrogant enough, but the Governor evidently has such contempt for the Legislature that he's going to use funds that have not even been identified as resources:

In his Sunday statement, the governor says he “will not use any funds currently available for public services for this case” yet his spokesman, Charles Reyes, acknowledged in an interview that money obtained through government settlements will pay for it

“The governor is not prepared to get into all the technical details at this point. Of course, we'll want the Legislature's blessing,” Reyes added.

Amazing, and how exactly do you put the genie back in the bottle if the Legislature disagrees? Then again, when all of the chittering is done, Rep. Diego Benavente tells us the likely outcome:

Although lawmakers acknowledge the governor's authority to sue the federal government and to transfer funds for the suit, he added, they believe the litigation will be costly and counterproductive

With all (due) respect, and granting that the Legislature has abdicated its responsibility by giving the Governor virtually unlimited reprogramming authority, this is evidently money that has not been identified or appropriated. That attitude (again) raises the question Why do we need a Legislature?

Oh, and a quibble for the reporters; the Saipan Tribune and the Marianas Variety don't even tell us who's being sued, though the Tribune implies it by saying the suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia "which is often the venue for challenges to federal regulations-against the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor."

"Hey listen. Don't you think you're bounding over your steps ?" -- Arthur Stanley Jefferson (Stan Laurel)