Why Trump’s ‘Settled Law’ Comments on Gay Marriage Could Be Bad News for His Immigration Agenda

President-elect Donald Trump’s belief that last summer’s gay marriage decision by the U.S. Supreme Court is settled law says a lot about where the incoming administration’s priorities are going to be. And it points to some potential future political problems from the federal courts, especially when it comes to immigration.

“It’s irrelevant,” he said on CBS’ Sunday’s airing of “60 Minutes,” regarding his personal views on gay marriage. “These cases have gone to the Supreme Court, they’ve been settled, and I’m fine with that.”

Donald Trump says same-sex marriage is "settled" law. pic.twitter.com/wqt4DC6WmJ

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) November 14, 2016

Firstly, this is a clear deviation from Trump’s stated position on Roe v. Wade in the same interview, which he and his surrogates have pledged to overturn. That clearly signals that, for some reason, SCOTUS railroading state sovereignty on making their own abortion laws isn’t the final word, but doing so for the kinds of unions that states recognize somehow is.

The myth of judicial supremacy drove one of the greatest narratives of the 2016 election cycle — that Americans had to get out the vote to decide on an executive who would pick the right oligarchs to legislate from the federal bench. Now it’s back, and some things apparently are “settled law,” while others are not.

Setting the inconsistencies here aside, conceding the myth of judicial supremacy as the president-elect has done here is going to create a host of problems down the road.

The transition team is already putting up a hard front on immigration, by staffing people like Kris Kobach, Kansas’ current secretary of state who helped write Arizona’s SB 1070. The state law, passed in 2010, drew intense criticism and boycotts from open-borders advocates for doing nothing more than giving police the ability to enforce America’s immigration laws. SB 1070 was gutted once and for all in a legal settlement with open-borders groups in September.

If the Trump administration and Congress are willing to kowtow to the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, they shouldn’t hold their breath on getting any sort of meaningful reform accomplished when it comes to immigration, either. If the federal courts and the Supreme Court start getting ahold of forthcoming immigration bills and first-100 directives, we’re going to have a lot of really problematic “settled law” on our hands.

Despite the technical victory immigration enforcement advocates won in U.S. v. Texas earlier this year, the federal circuit courts have still been, for the most part, openly hostile to any sort of immigration control at the state level whatsoever. This hostility has reared its head in everything from forcing Arizona to issue drivers licenses to illegals to mandating that six states completely ignore ICE while voiding thousands of illegal immigration detainers.

But considering it’s hard to imagine that the Trump administration would take judicial tampering in immigration reforms lying down, the president-elect’s statement that Obergefell is “settled law” is probably best understood as an indicator of future priorities. That shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, given his public stance in spring regarding bathroom bill battles, and his relationship with Peter Thiel.

However, despite this and other concessions that Trump has made to the LGBT community, others are still losing their minds and warning of the forthcoming homophobic cataclysm that will arise from a Trump-Pence administration. Following last week’s immediate election reactions (or, overreactions, rather), similar voices are now decrying the transition team’s inclusion of former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell as a sign of an oncoming assault on gay rights.

Huffington Post’s “Queer Voices” editor-at-large, Michelangelo Signorile points to comments made by Blackwell eight years about handling same-sex attraction and warns, “Expect each of these individuals and more religious bigots to have prominent positions in the Trump administration.”

Again, the heightened anxieties despite Trump’s historically moderate stance on the issue is beyond perplexing. Perhaps the shocking realization that a sizable chunk of the American people disagree with your agenda, that said voters’ First Amendment rights are no longer on the chopping block, and that the shiny new federal death ray you were going to use to obliterate the latter isn’t coming is a lot to deal with all at once.

Proponents of natural marriage have already made peace with the fact that many of their fellow citizens don’t see eye-to-eye with them. It’s time to realize that common-sense compromise on the subject at this juncture (like First Amendment Defense Act, which the president-elect has pledged to sign) isn’t persecution or discrimination; it’s a way forward in a republic that’s deeply divided on a fundamental issue of public and private import.

While it was grossly unrealistic in the first place that the Supreme Court — even with a shiny new originalist justice on board — would overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, it looks like the issue won’t face much pressure from the oncoming administration the next four years. However, if the Trump administration actually wants to clamp down on illegal immigration against the forces of an overwhelmingly open-borders federal judiciary, the president-elect might want to be careful using phrases like “settled law.” (For more from the author of “Why Trump’s ‘Settled Law’ Comments on Gay Marriage Could Be Bad News for His Immigration Agenda” please click HERE)

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