After the Supreme Court ruling on immigration, which upheld a key provision in the law, the Obama administration has declared war on Arizona. Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio told FOX News:

“I’m not stopping anything. I’m going to continue to enforce those state laws regardless of what the federal government is trying to put pressure on me to satisfy all these activists. . . . So, I’m not going to bend to the federal government, especially when we still have state laws to enforce.”

All of this reminds of the 1950 film Born Yesterday. Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) is a tyrant who wheels and deals in political payoffs. He uses his power and money to buy his way through Washington. He’s loud, rich, and abusive. “Do what I’m tellin’ ya!” he constantly shouts at Billie Dawn (Judy Holliday).

Billie takes Harry’s abuse, and Harry preys on her dumb-blonde ignorance. But even Harry can’t stomach her ignorance, so he hires Paul (William Holden), a reporter, to tutor Billie. He has his work cut out for him, but in time, he gets results.

Paul gives her a crash course in the history of the American Revolution. He takes her to the Jefferson Memorial to inspire her to rebel against her personal tyrant. Here are the words from Thomas Jefferson that they read at the Jefferson Memorial:

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

If it was good enough for Jefferson, it should be good enough for Gov. Jan Brewer, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the rest of us.

Justice Scalia gets to the heart of the sovereignty issue in his dissent of Arizona v. United States.

• “Today’s opinion . . .  deprives states of what most would consider the defining characteristic of sovereignty: the power to exclude from the sovereign’s territory people who have no right to be there. Neither the Constitution itself nor even any law passed by Congress supports this result.”

• “As a sovereign, Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory, subject only to those limitations expressed in the Constitution or constitutionally imposed by Congress. That power to exclude has long been recognized as inherent in sovereignty.”

• “Arizona is entitled to have its own immigration policy — including a more rigorous enforcement policy — so long as that does not conflict with federal law. The Court says, as though the point is utterly dispositive, that it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States. It is not a federal crime, to be sure. But there is no reason Arizona cannot make it a state crime for … any illegal alien … to remain present in Arizona.”

• “Of course there is no reason why the federal executive’s need to allocate its scarce resources to illegal immigration should disable Arizona from devoting its resources to illegal immigration in Arizona that in its view the federal executive has given short shrift.”