Isn’t this also the fault of the states, in part for allowing their own soveriegnity at the federal level to be removed, and for choosing poorly on the occasions when some states did stand up to the feds and say no?
We are now seeing some of the states alter their laws in manners designed to tell the federal government that it is beyond its boundaries. We see it with abortion laws, which hasn’t worked very well. We see it with state firearm acts, which also threatens very little. Arizone lit the most powerful fuse with its immigration law, and 0bama even admits that they did it because the feds have abrogated their responsibility.
Probably this will go nowhere, although the Arizona immigration law has some potential to survive challenges and affect at least the people who (legally) live in that state. In many cases, telling the feds to go to hell results in the loss of massive amounts of funding, and the state can’t refuse to pay the feds on some other grounds in order to cover the loss. That noose is very tight.
One potential way to affect the feds is to affect their ability to enforce the laws they’ve enacted. Did you know that your state has an exemption in its gun laws for federal cops? What if a state took that away? Suddenly, a machine gun toting team of feds is breaking the laws of state X, and very serious laws at that. Felony charges, even, regardless of their mission.
It might be possible to mount a constitutional challenge to extradition. Does a federal arrest violate extradition from a state? Can the state refuse to extradite to the federal court? Although this seems to be an opportunity for criminals to run free, remember that Arizona can also take its federal fugitives and send them to southern California, where the feds can go find them in the future. I hope some lawyer can answer this question.
I think the Civil War settled whether a State or States would “war” with the Federal Government. With the branches outside the Judiciary feeling its “not their job” to limit General Government tendancies on Constitutional grounds and the Court will take that task alone, their subversion of understanding is the true abrogation of the 10th Amendment.
A continued effort for the States to assert the 10th parameters is only going to help over time, but the AZ case is more like a Suit of Mandamus trying to force the Feds to execute their own law by stepping in to augment with State forces.