Justices William Rehnquist, ByronWhite and Anthony Kennedy said they would allow restrictions on abortion, but only if the restrictions had a rational basis.
Under Supreme Court precedent, a state doesn't have the power to block the enforcement of federal law inside its borders, said Joseph Thai, a constitutional law professor at the University of Oklahoma who served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and ByronWhite.
Even before the ink had dried on the Arizona law, CIS issued talking points insisting that it was nothing more than a mirror image of the federal law--a claim that Byron York, National Review's former White House correspondent, immediately repeated in his column.