Day 32 in China

My camera has been a bit idle lately. I suppose it is because I hate carrying it around. I worry too much about it, and it's a little heavy for my coat pocket on class days. I have not been so idle. Tomorrow should be a great day for pictures. Tomorrow is a national holiday, the 4th day of the 4th month. I am not sure what the holiday is for, but I will find out tomorrow.

Today was my American Governmental Structures class. I found an audio file for the infamous IND v Chadha case. The mp3 was the actual argument recorded from the case. I had a few of my students come up in front of the class and play lawyers and judges. We reenacted the opening argument of the INS, which was a bit lame really. INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services) argues that Congress' law allowing it (the INS) to make unilateral proposals/decisions about immigration cases is constitutional because the INS said "no". That was the crux of their argument: saying an immigrant cannot stay in the US, i.e. that they will not make a special allowance for Mr. Chadha to stay in the U.S. after his Visa expired, is not an excercise of judicial power. The attorney said that because Congress says "no" that no positive law was made. Hah ahahahahahahahaha. You can hear me laugh aloud. It is an interesting syntactic argument. I mean in a sense, there was no law passed specifically about Chadha. However, the law in question is the law, Congress made, that allows Congress to unilaterally approve or suspend immigration hearings and make a final decision of its own. It should not matter whether .....well, I shouldn't bore you. Leave it to say that it was not easy to explain the exquisitely fine point INS lawyers were making. I had to pause the mp3 often, and act out or explain what the lawyer said. The students responded well to it.

The case was actually quite hillarious to listen to. INS lawyers making the most inane legalese arguments, based solely on the syntax of a non-statutory and simply political doctrine, and the judges trying to get to the bottom of the theory. Those INS lawyers should have really done their homework. They could have at least framed the INS decision as an executive decision of disretion. I think they tried to, but failed to mention the words "executive power." A mightly failure in my opinion. It had me wondering how they lost the case. The executive branch makes discretionary decisions all the time!