AZ Senate passes Pearce’s police state bill, sends it to Jan Brewer for her signature

Posted by Craig McDermott, cross-posted from Random Musings

I can understand disagreeing with most of what comes out of the AZ lege, most of the time, it's just politics.

What I can't stand is being ashamed of what comes out of the lege.

Tonight, I'm profoundly embarrassed to be an Arizonan.

From Reuters (yes, this is getting worldwide coverage) –

Arizona lawmakers passed a controversial immigration bill on Monday requiring police in the state that borders Mexico to determine if people are in the United States illegally, a measure critics say is open to racial profiling.

Lawmakers in the Arizona Senate voted 17 to 11 to approve the bill, widely regarded as the toughest measure yet taken by any U.S. state to curb illegal immigration.

And the money quote from the article –

"I believe handcuffs are a wonderful tool when they're on the right people," said Russell Pearce, the Republican state senator who wrote the bill.

We want to "get them off law enforcement and get them on the bad guys," he told Reuters.

For those of you who aren't familiar with our Sen. Pearce, when he says "bad guys" and "the right people" for handcuffs, he's referring to people with skin that is a color other than white, reserving a special contempt for people of Mexican descent (remember his proposal to restart "Operation Wetback" anyone?)

As noted in the article, the vote was 17-11, with the voting going almost completely along party lines. The only Democrats who didn't oppose the bill were Amanda Aguirre and Albert Hale, who were both absent.

The only Republican who had both enough humanity and spine to oppose the bill was Carolyn Allen.

All of the rest of the Rs in the Senate fall into one of two categories –

Pure evil

Craven cowards

Late last week, a friend of mine from work who is of Mexican descent but was is a U.S. citizen by birth, as are her children and grandchildren, asked me about this bill and what she should do when she is pulled over by the police and they demand to see her papers.

All I had for her was a lame "be polite and give them over."

When she asked why the law was going to be passed, I told her that some of the people in the lege "simply don't like brown people", to which she replied that "brown people vote, too."

Unfortunately, not enough vote in the general election and almost none vote in the Republican primaries.

Which brings us to the question of whether or not Jan Brewer will sign the bill into law.

Rest assured, she will.

She's running in a Republican primary where every candidate is trying to out-right-wingnut her (and she was pretty much a far right ideologue even before the primary season started.) This bill is tailor-made for someone who is trying to get the Tea Party/nativist wing of the GOP on their side.

In other words, the real question isn't "will she sign it?" but "will she be doing the Snoopy dance on a copy of the Bill of Rights while she signs it, or will she just be grinning from ear-to-ear for the cameras?"

5 thoughts on “AZ Senate passes Pearce’s police state bill, sends it to Jan Brewer for her signature”

  1. So many people take white privilege for granted, and don’t understand what it’s like to be a minority person. I don’t think many of the people in the lege ever consider their luck in being born white.
    BTW, you reveal yourself when you refer to “socialis (sic) on our side of the border.” Methinks you watch too much FOX.

  2. Jon,

    Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce sent out an email containing an article entitled “Who Rules America?” from the website of White Supremacist organization The National Alliance. In addition, he has both publicly appeared with and publicly supported friend and avowed Neo-Nazi J.T. Ready. Information such as this regarding Pearce and other Arizona Legislators and elected officials is easily obtained. What motivates Pearce’s positions on immigration policy is quite transparent at this point.

  3. Jon, On this one, I stand by what I said and what I wrote. While I was angry when I wrote it, that anger didn’t cause me to overstate the situation.

    It wasn’t hyperbole. It was a conclusion reached from years of observation of the lege, both from afar and down at the Capitol.

    When the nativists in the lege start trying to address the underlying economic causes of the cross-border migration instead of merely attacking the people who migrate because of the economic reasons that the lege is ignoring, I’ll stop referring to them as “the nativists in the lege” and worse.

    Until that day, however, “the nativists in the lege” is the mildest term that I’ll use to describe them.

  4. I think most people would take offense to the statement “I told her that some of the people in the lege “simply don’t like brown people””.

    It’s obvious to me people on this site can be said that “some of the people in the lege “simply don’t like Republican people”.

    Being a libertarian I agree this legislation is horrible but throwing the race card around all the time is childish to say the least. I don’t think most legislators are racist, I would say they are confused and diluted and let their emotions get in their way rational thinking and that they need to read more history and understand that our borders have mostly been open and that it is only in recent history that they are starting to close, what our the core reasons for this? I don’t know, I can only speculate. I assume the following might have something to do with it:
    The drug war, socialis on our side of the border, corrupt government in Mexico (for that matter in the US also), corporatismm, etc.

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