SCOTUS has ruled on SB1070.
To recap:
The administration chose to prosecute this one on jurisdictional grounds, figuring that the most effective way to get it overturned was to say it was a matter of a state stepping on feds' toes.
I thought this was a mistake, as the most pernicious flaws in SB1070 are inseparable from the issues of race, civil rights, and equal protection under the law.
Well, from the ruling, it seems that we were both right. 3 sections of SB1070 got thrown out on jurisdictional grounds -- but one, the infamous "show me your papers" section, was upheld.
With a "for now", of course. This isn't over; there are civil rights suits wending their way through the courts right now and I see it as inevitable that it'll get thrown out once somebody goes to the Supreme Court and says "Oh hey you can't actually define 'reasonable suspicion' of someone being a Mexican without taking race into account." But that'll take years.
The lawyer my local NPR affiliate had on this morning advised that any legal immigrants keep their papers on them for now, which is contrary to the claim I've seen in some places that an ID is good enough. Of course, that's not going to help people who were born here and don't HAVE immigration papers. And, complicating things further, Arizona does not require citizens to carry ID -- though SB1070's stop-and-frisk provisions deal primarily with traffic stops, and I'm not sure if there are any cases about it being invoked on people walking down the street.
Anyway. It's a start. But I sure as hell wish they'd overturned the "it's okay to harrass brown people" part.