Mr. Stone said the Texas law “is capped at much less than that.”
“Yeah,” Chief Justice Roberts said, a little irritated. “My question is what we call a hypothetical.”
Justice Kagan said Texas should not be rewarded for drafting a clever law.
“The fact that after all these many years, some geniuses came up with a way to evade the commands of” an important precedent, she said, and “the even broader principle that states are not to nullify federal constitutional rights and to say, ‘Oh, we’ve never seen this before, so we can’t do anything about it’ — I guess I just don’t understand the argument.”
Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, representing the federal government, said the Texas law was designed “to thwart the supremacy of federal law in open defiance of our constitutional structure.”
“States are free to ask this court to reconsider its…
