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Monday Musings: Will AZ’s GOP trifecta vanish in 2021?
Political junkies who love a good soap opera should tune in to Arizona’s Legislative District 6, where the 2020 election could end the Republican’s “trifecta” control of the Governor’s Office, the State House and the Senate
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The story of Arizona’s turbulent evolution on immigration — from Raúl Castro to Joe Arpaio to the election in 2018 of Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, to the U.S. Senate — provides a fascinating lesson in the history of the Southwest and, possibly, the future of the Democratic Party as it challenges Republican supremacy in traditional strongholds.
When Arizona Elected a Mexican Immigrant Governor
Border Patrol agents once ordered an elderly Hispanic man out of his vehicle and requested his identity papers, which showed that he was a Mexican-born immigrant named Raúl H. Castro.
Turns out he was Arizona’s former governor.
". . .Ten years ago this spring, Arizona’s leaders enacted one of the most contentious anti-immigration bills that any state has adopted in recent history: SB 1070, the first of the so-called “show me your papers” laws, which gave Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County and other local police officers broad power to detain anyone without a warrant if they suspected they had committed a deportable offense.
Born in 1916 in northern Mexico into a poverty-stricken family that crossed the border when he was a child, Mr. Castro was elected Arizona’s first and only Latino governor in 1974, the pinnacle of an exceptional political career that seems nearly unimaginable to replicate in today’s Arizona.
. . . Just how far the pendulum has swung became clear earlier this year, when the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, proposed a constitutional amendment to enshrine a ban on sanctuary cities — a measure that only a few years ago might have won easy approval. Clearly, Mr. Ducey expected that it still might.
But hearings on the issue in the state legislature erupted into chaos, amid an outcry from Latino leaders and immigrant advocates.
The state’s business community sent an immediate signal of alarm to the governor.
Soon after he proposed the measure,
the governor withdrew it.
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Arizona’s transformation came amid colossal demographic shifts that are still reshaping American politics.
> Latinos today make up one-third of the state’s population, compared with only about 10 percent when Mr. Castro was elected governor in the mid-1970s.
> Over the same span of time, Arizona has experienced one of the most remarkable domestic migrations of the past half-century. Americans from other states — largely white transplants from the Rust Belt, California and parts of the South — pushed the state’s population from 2.2 million in Mr. Castro’s time to more than 7 million today.
Many of the arrivals brought their conservative politics with them. Settling in sun-baked suburbs, they put down stakes in a state created by men who sought to prevent someone like Mr. Castro from ever rising to power.
> After statehood in 1912, officials enacted a poll tax aimed at preventing Hispanics from voting. Up until the 1960s, elected leaders like Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964, sought to prevent Spanish-speaking citizens from voting by requiring English-literacy tests.
‘Keep Out Everyone Undesirable’
> Mr. Oliphant, known to his followers as “Preacher Jack,” ran a remote Christian-oriented work camp for troubled teenagers. He told his congregants that a race war was imminent and formed a militia, the Arizona Patriots, to prosecute Arizona’s side of the conflict.
> In 1986, the same year Preacher Jack was arrested, a Pontiac dealer called Evan Mecham mounted a campaign for governor by attacking the state’s Republican elite.
Shocking Arizona’s political establishment, he won.
< Russell Pearce, a former police officer who had been elected to the legislature in 2000, was an avid reader of the work of Cleon Skousen, a Mormon political theorist and former F.B.I. agent who called for the elimination of anti-discrimination laws and the elimination of the separation of church and state.
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Russell Pearce, the state legislator known for targeting immigrants, was ready.
His bill, SB 1070, won approval in the Arizona legislature. A national outcry ensued.
Jan Brewer, the Republican governor at the time, attended a gala of Hispanic business leaders honoring none other than Raúl Castro. Ms. Brewer said in a speech that night that she had heard the concerns of Hispanic leaders about the proposed legislation.
She assured them that she would “do the right thing, so that everyone is treated fairly.”
Some in attendance took that to mean she planned to veto Mr. Pearce’s bill.
Instead, she signed SB 1070 into law.
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As Mr. Pearce dug in his heels, voters ousted him in a recall in 2011.
BLOGGER NOTE; Russell Pearce has been employed in a state job for a number of years now.
He endorsed Mark Freeman who was elected to the Mesa Council in 2016 to represent District 1.
* See related content posted on this blog below
* See related content posted on this blog below
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The growth of the Hispanic population that was happening at the same time jolted some of the white transplants who had settled largely in suburban areas around Phoenix, like Mesa, the city to the east that Mr. Pearce called home, and friction was building.
> Sheriff Joe Arpaio It was shortly past midnight on Oct. 16, 2008, when the voice of the dispatcher from the Mesa Police Department crackled over the walkie-talkies. . .
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The 60-member force in the park near Mesa’s Mormon Temple was dressed SWAT-style, grasping rifles. Accompanied by police dogs, the group stormed Mesa’s City Hall around 2:30 a.m. in a sweep targeting Latino immigrants. The raid had been ordered by the county sheriff, Joe Arpaio.
The operation was a dud. Officers found only three middle-aged cleaning women without residency papers. Neither the mayor nor the police chief in Mesa, a city of half a million that is larger than Pittsburgh, had been given any inkling of Mr. Arpaio’s plans.
> The police chief in Mesa at the height of Mr. Arpaio’s power was a Cuban immigrant, George Gascón. Mr. Gascón clashed repeatedly with Mr. Arpaio over the sheriff’s assertions that Latino immigrants were a criminal threat.
“In Arizona, being anti-immigrant is code language for disliking brown people,”
Mr. Gascón, who went on to become district attorney in San Francisco and is now running for the same job in Los Angeles.
* RUSSELL PEARCE RELATED CONTENT
12 December 2019
It's none other than the long-time notorious conservative Mesa Republican Russell Pearce* who's now got a new gig as chief deputy to Maricopa County treasurer Royce Flora. He testified for only two minutes as the last defense witness for Petersen's attorney Kory Langhofer.
He said the treasurer’s office works very closely with the assessor’s office, and that the treasurer saw no evidence of the office’s official duties not being performed during Petersen’s absence.
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He said the treasurer’s office works very closely with the assessor’s office, and that the treasurer saw no evidence of the office’s official duties not being performed during Petersen’s absence.
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BLOGGER NOTE: Ostensibly the Feds seized Petersen and leveled more than 60 charges against him in three states over a private adoption business that took him into custody and out-of-state at the end of October.
There's way more to the story than that when you take a look at what the Assessor's Office is in charge of . . . and Petersen is willing to resign for 9 month's of severance pay???
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There's way more to the story than that when you take a look at what the Assessor's Office is in charge of . . . and Petersen is willing to resign for 9 month's of severance pay???
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Just how good can these suspension hearings get when a character like Russell Pearce* appears in public "out of the woodwork" and just happens to testify how very closely the county treasurer's office and the county assessor's work?
In an AZ Mirror report yesterday at 5:00 p.m. by Jeremy Duda
In an AZ Mirror report yesterday at 5:00 p.m. by Jeremy Duda
