Janbo
Arizona’s image in the mainstream media has taken a pounding since I signed SB 1070. Opponents of the law have been determined to explain away its majority support (in Arizona and the rest of the country) as the product of racism. It’s a cheap, easy, unsubstantiated accusation that is designed not to further debate but to shut it down. Instead of debating the merits of the law—or even reading it, in the case of Attorney General Eric Holder—the media and many Washington politicians prefer hysterical name calling.
For me, one of the many low points in this sordid national drama came when ABC took its hidden-camera show What Would You Do? to Tucson earlier this year. The show, in case you’ve never seen it, is a quasi news program that seems determined to cast the American people in the worst possible light. They use actors to stage scenes designed to bring out the meanness in people—a phony waitress refusing to serve actors playing gay patrons at a restaurant, or a dwarf at a convenience store being ridiculed by other actors playing insensitive shoppers. All the hateful, bigoted stuff is done by actors, mind you. The responses from real Americans are taped by hidden cameras.
As you can see, I’m not crazy about What Would You Do? It values the sensational and the confrontational over the truth and creates fake “news” designed to attract ratings. But the show’s producers really outdid themselves when they came to Tucson. Under the pretext of examining the implications of SB 1070, they staged a phony scene in a restaurant with the wonderfully Arizonan name of BK Carne Asada & Hot Dogs. In the setup, actors playing Hispanic patrons were harassed by an actor playing a racist security guard. The guard demanded to see the customers’ IDs as they stood in line for tacos and the restaurant’s famous Sonoran-style hot dogs, saying he just wanted to make sure they were “legal.” It was a grotesque distortion of the actual provisions of Arizona’s immigration law—a lie of such magnitude that the Arizona Speaker of the House, Kirk Adams, later demanded that ABC apologize for airing the show. I, too, was outraged. SB 1070 gives no one the right to ask people standing in a restaurant for their identification, much less an off-duty security guard.
What the producers didn’t count on was the reaction by the real-life Arizonans in the restaurant. Time and again, as the cameras rolled, unsuspecting Arizonans came to the aid of the people they thought were innocent, harassed Hispanics. They were outraged by the (fake) bigotry they witnessed. At one point it looked as if they were about to come to blows with the security guard, and a reporter was forced to step out of the shadows and admit it was all a setup. Everyone in the restaurant was good-natured about it when they found out the truth. I’ll just say this: They took the deception better than I would have.
That obnoxious show stays with me, both for how grossly it distorted the law we passed and, more important, for the tolerance and caring it showed by Arizonans themselves. Liberal activists and their media accomplices can call Arizonans racist all they want, but when they brought in hidden cameras to record how we actually treat one another, Arizonans showed them otherwise.
This is the Arizona I know—the Arizona I’ve always known. After all, most Arizonans are (like me) from somewhere else. We’ve always been a state that welcomes outsiders. All we’ve asked is that people obey the law, respect their neighbors, and respect our state.
Now, it’s true that the Arizona I know has an independent streak. We’ve always proudly and defiantly gone our own way. We haven’t always danced to the tune set in Washington, New York, or Hollywood. No, we don’t observe daylight saving time. And, yes, we honor the Second Amendment and allow law-abiding citizens to carry guns. But most of all, we respect and take care of one another as neighbors and fellow citizens. And that goes as much for the Hispanics whose families have been here since before statehood as the Anglos who moved here during the 1990s boom.
Arizona is defiantly different. I think that’s why I’ve always felt at home here. My parents, Wilford and Edna Drinkwine, raised a defiantly different girl.
I was born in California but spent my first ten years living on base at the country’s largest Navy munitions depot in Hawthorne, Nevada. My father worked as a civilian there, first as one of the men packing explosives into bomb casings for the war in Germany and Japan and later as a supervisor. For years we were happy—my big brother, Paul, my mom, my dad, and me. We were a close, loving family and were part of a military community that was very much united in the belief that we were part of something noble in fighting fascism in Europe and imperial Japan.
But when I was around eight, my father suddenly got very sick. His respiratory system failed him. The doctors could do little for him other than recommend that he move to Tujunga, California, where the sea air meets the desert to provide an ideal environment, they said, for people with respiratory problems. So we packed up and moved. And when I was eleven, my father died. Losing him devastated our family. No longer a child and not yet a young woman, I was suddenly without the man I had loved most in the world.
What I remember most from this period was the overwhelming grief my family and I shared. But I realize now that my father’s death was also my first encounter with the federal government—and it was not a good one.
My father’s job had involved years of working around the chemicals and fumes of the munitions plant. All these toxins eventually took their toll and made him ill. I remember how, when he knew the end was coming, he desperately sought government disability and survivor benefits for my brother, my mother, and me. He met and pleaded with our congressman and the Department of the Navy to take care of us. He literally couldn’t breathe, and yet he poured every ounce of energy he had left into this final effort. After he died, my mother did the same. I still recall her sitting at the kitchen table with all the paperwork surrounding her, going over facts and dates. And I remember her going, respectfully but persistently, to the congressman’s local office to plead for help. But other than a small Social Security check for my brother and me until we were eighteen, no help ever came. For me, it was a painful and important lesson.
My mother had never worked outside the home before. Now she found herself alone with two children to raise. Like all single mothers, she needed something flexible so she could take care of my brother and me. So she took every penny she had and bought a small dress store in Sunland, California. Her reasoning was completely practical: As a small-business woman, she would be the boss. If she had to leave work to be with us, she could. And, of course, we could spend time with her at the store. And that’s what we did. She worked seven days a week, fifteen hours a day. She had no choice.
My mother’s dress shop became my classroom. The things I learned there, working alongside her during those long afternoons after school, shaped me for life.
For example, I learned from my mother in that dress shop the hard lesson of accountability. When you’re the boss, you’re the last one to get paid—you get whatever’s left after everyone else has their paychecks. I learned patience—and that the customer is always right. I learned initiative. When you’re responsible for a business, there’s no such thing as a job description. If something falls on the floor, you pick it up. If inventory has to get done, there goes your weekend. No contract, no list of responsibilities defines the limits of your duties. You work until the job gets done. Most of all, I learned not to shrink from a challenge. Running a business is hard work, and it’s made no easier by having to raise two children.
I also learned in my mother’s dress shop about the power of government and the responsibilities of citizenship. I remember watching her cash out the register drawer at the end of every day. She would separate the sales tax receipts from the rest of the receipts, and it was my job to go to the bank and deposit the money into the two accounts she had created, one for the taxes she owed and another for the rest of the store’s expenses. As young as I was, it struck me as odd that there would be two accounts. “It’s our money, isn’t it?” I asked my mom. And she said, “No, we owe the government.” When I asked what for, she said it was for the streets, the firemen, and the schools. She was very patriotic. She said it was everyone’s duty to contribute. But I remember detecting a note of apprehension in her voice as well, and I learned later that she kept the taxes separate because she also feared the government: If she didn’t have enough to pay her taxes, she knew that she might lose the store.
Like all great teachers, my parents taught me more by what they did than what they said. For instance, when I was very little, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She was fortunate and survived with surgery. But I remember that when she came home from the hospital, she was very sick. My father did his best to work and take care of us, but he was overwhelmed.
This was a time when the housing on base was still segregated. But there was an African American family named Johnson that was part of the congregation at our church. God bless them, the Johnsons wanted to help out, so they came to visit us on the “white” side of the base. I remember they brought us food. My dad welcomed them into our home, and my mother, though still very sick, was very appreciative. After they left, our neighbor across the street came over to our house, very upset. He was screaming and yelling about how it was wrong to allow those “niggers” into our home. My father exchanged words with him and—pretty emotionally, as I recall—asked him to leave.
We didn’t talk about it again that night. But I vividly remember sitting at my mother’s bedside the next day. As usual, the lesson she wanted to impart involved doing the right thing and taking individual responsibility. As she did so many times, she reminded me about the Golden Rule that we needed to live by: to treat others the way we wanted to be treated. She told me the Johnsons were good people, and that it was our home and we could choose to have our friends come to our home. She said our neighbors were judging people by the color of their skin, but that wasn’t how I was to judge people. Judge them, she said, by their hearts and by their actions.
My mother’s words and, more important, my parents’ actions, have stayed with me all these years. I missed my mother more than I can say in those moments after I became governor, when outsiders and critics were saying the most hurtful things about me—saying that I was, in essence, like our neighbor across the street so long ago. If she were with me now, I think she would remind me of her saying: “Doing the right thing almost always means doing the hard thing.” I have always strived to do the right thing—for my family, for my state, and for my country. I can’t say I’ve never made mistakes, but I’ve never backed down from a fight when it came to doing the right thing for the people of Arizona.
My lightbulb moment came at a school board meeting.
I was a young wife and mother, attending a school board meeting in the early 1980s—and I was appalled. I was pretty naive about politics, but I knew a lack of common sense when I heard it, and I heard it when the board members opened their mouths to speak. I went home and asked my husband, John, “Who are those people?” And he said, “Well, they’re the school board.” So I said, “How did they get there?” He answered, “They were elected by the people in the school district.” And I said, “Well, I could do at least as good a job as they are, if not better.”
I had been an Arizonan for less than a decade and had never seen myself as a politician. I had married John Brewer, and while he attended school for his chiropractic degree, I worked to support him. When he set up his practice in Glendale in 1970, I was the office manager. And while we were building his business, we were creating a family. We were blessed with three beautiful sons: Ronald, John, and Michael.
I was happy raising a family and putting the lessons I had learned in my mother’s dress shop to good use in my husband’s business. It was the darn computers that were my undoing. When my husband decided to computerize his business, I took it as my cue to leave. I had never been a technology geek, and I had no intention of starting then. So I went home and started thinking about what to do next. I had to be active. I became a Cub Scout leader. I tried being an entrepreneur with a short-lived jumping-jack (or bounce house, as they are known these days) business. Finally, I got a Corvette for Mother’s Day, put on a pair of jeans, and went back to community college.
Then I went to the school board meeting. I wanted to do something to improve education in Arizona, not just for my own sons but for all the kids. I thought they needed some accountability. And it occurred to me, If I don’t do it, who will? When I told my dazed husband that I was thinking about running for the school board, he gave me some good advice: “Jan, if you really want to have an impact on education, you need to run for the legislature.”
That really threw me for a loop. Who was I, to run for the state legislature? How would I go about it? In 1982 there was a new legislative district in the northwest Phoenix area stretching into Sun City that represented a good opportunity for a novice like me. But could I possibly win? I thought about it for three or four days. Then I checked in with John again. I was sitting in the den of our home when he walked in.
Me: Guess what I’m gonna do?
John: What?
Me: I’m going to run for the legislature. I’m going to do it. Will you support me?
John: Absolutely.
Me: [pausing] No, I mean financially.
John: Oh.
John ended up being my greatest supporter and most valued mentor. But I couldn’t rely on him for everything. Running for office meant standing on my own two feet. I had to have confidence in myself before I could ask others to have confidence in me. I found myself, yet again, going back to my mother’s dress shop. If I could have half the courage, independence, and determination that she had, I thought, I could actually do this.
The first order of business was to announce my campaign. I remember sitting in my beach house in Rocky Point, Mexico, hand-addressing invitations asking my friends to join me at my house for an announcement party to kick off the campaign. A few weeks later, more than one hundred people were at my house—even retired Illinois congressman Harold Velde showed up. He turned out to be a huge supporter.
Next I needed to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot. I had never collected a signature before, and at first I wasn’t quite sure where to start. So, like any mom, I started with what I knew best: the grocery store.
Slowly, painfully, I learned how to approach people and ask for their support. More than once, I thought I would give up. But when I finally got up the courage to approach people, I was amazed to find that they would actually sign! After I got my first signature, I couldn’t be stopped. “Hi. I’m Jan Brewer, and I’m running for the legislature from District Nineteen. Can I have your support?” I repeated it again and again, with growing confidence. I became a pit bull out there. I actually chased people through the parking lot.
Every morning, to catch the stay-at-home moms while they shopped, I would show up in front of the grocery store—with Ron, John, and Michael in tow—with my tan, my big hair, and my tennis shoes. In the afternoons I would walk door to door in the neighborhoods. And every evening I would be back at the grocery store to corner the people on their way home from work. I did this every day for five straight months.
After I had gathered the absolute maximum number of signatures allowed by law to place my name on the ballot came the real test: fund-raising. This was the part I dreaded most. I couldn’t bear the thought of asking people for money. My mother had never taken a dime from anyone—everything we ever had, she earned. The idea of walking up to strangers and asking them to give me money on the promise—even the sincere one—that I deserved their support was completely against my character.
But I was my mother’s daughter. I had to do it. So I did it.
I realize now how important it was for me to ask for and receive the donations of those early supporters. I used to have coffees in the backyards of the farmers in my district. We would enjoy the weather, have good things to eat, watch the children run around, and talk about the issues. These people are the salt of the earth. Their beliefs are strong and their desires are simple. They want their families to be safe. They want their families to be provided for. They want to leave behind a better country than the one they inherited. These simple beliefs get twisted and complicated in our political process, but they don’t change for the people who hold them. It was important for me, back then, to hear about them firsthand. To get to know the remarkable Arizonans who hold them. To shake their hands and receive their trust and know that it was now up to me to live up to it.
It was at one of these small coffees that I received my first donation. I went to the home of a farmer named Ralph Baskett Jr. I remember taking a few questions from Ralph and his guests and having a nice time. I hoped I had earned their trust and support. And just as I was getting up to go, thinking I had struck out, Ralph left the room for a moment and came back with a check. I was floored. I had received the validation of someone’s hard-earned money. He trusted me enough to invest in my future. The Baskett family has supported me ever since.
I began my life in public service when I was sworn in as a state representative on January 10, 1983. It was a time of change, both in Arizona and the rest of America. The recession had hit Arizona hard, but the state was changing and growing economically and culturally. When I was sworn in, I was part of the biggest class of female legislators in the country.
In Washington, the Reagan Revolution was under way. It was an exciting time to be entering politics. The country was experiencing a rebirth of freedom, individual initiative, and patriotism. For me, as for so many others, Ronald Reagan was a hero. I looked to him as a bright, steady light of guidance in all the principles that have made our country great.
It didn’t take long for this wife and mother turned citizen legislator to start knocking heads for truth and justice. I couldn’t help myself. I was constitutionally incapable of backing down when I thought a wrong had been committed. I was surrounded by voices telling me to do the political thing, to think about not upsetting potential supporters in my next election. But those voices were always drowned out by the voice of my mother reminding me that doing the right thing usually means doing the hard thing.
My first brush with controversy set the tone for much of the rest of my career. It was 1985, and I was beginning my second term in the Arizona House. That year, the state was introduced to a genuinely ugly human being: a losing legislative candidate, part-time cabdriver, and full-time publicity hound named Terry Choate.
Think of the Phelpses of the Westboro Baptist Church, that family of psychopaths who hold up offensive signs at veterans’ funerals. Terry was just like them, but with less charm.
Terry got it into his head to build a monument to Vietnam War protesters. Late in 1985, he bought some land on the west side of Phoenix and applied for permits to create the “Jane Fonda Vietnam Victory Park.” He planned to build a thirty-foot tower to fly the flag of Communist North Vietnam, our enemy in the war that had ended just ten years before. He even talked about getting a part of the plane in which Arizona senator John McCain had been shot down to display in the park.
I was chairman of the Select Committee for Veterans’ Affairs at the time, and I was hearing every day from outraged veterans. I’ve always had a soft spot for our veterans, having grown up on a Navy base and known so many families whose fathers and mothers never came back from World War II and the Korean War. I personally thought that what Terry Choate was planning to do bordered on treason. So I decided to shut him down. Over howls of protest from the First Amendment purists, I introduced a bill to outlaw the public flying of the flag of a country with which the United States did not currently have diplomatic relations—in other words, North Vietnam.
In my remarks introducing the bill, it was impossible for me to hide my sense of outrage. Now, when I look at my prepared statement, I can see the righteous indignation written all over it.
The North Vietnamese flag flying over the monument, I told the House, would be “a slap in the face of all our veterans who have fought and those who have died so that we may have freedom! Many came home ZIPPED IN BAGS. For what? For our freedom. And I assure you, THEY DIDN’T LIKE THE WAR EITHER. . . . To allow a communist flag to fly in Arizona is to achieve glory from a traitor’s vantage; to dance on the graves of those LOYAL AMERICAN VETERANS who have fought and died for OUR FREEDOM.”
I was pretty fired up. To me, this was about much more than Terry Choate. It was about a country that was slowly emerging from years of malaise and starting to feel good about itself for the first time in years. It was about men and women who had sacrificed for their country and come home only to be spat on and called baby killers. Maybe it wasn’t fashionable to stand up for these men and women—maybe it wasn’t intellectually sophisticated to defend this vision of America—but I really didn’t care. I was doing the right thing, as I saw it, for the people of Arizona.
My bill was overwhelmingly approved by my colleagues in the Judiciary Committee but was dropped by the House when it was declared unconstitutional. So I introduced another bill, this one prohibiting the creation of public parks that would be harmful to the public order. At that point a liberal columnist at the Arizona Republic wrote a column criticizing my bills (in the most illogical fashion, by the way, equating an America-hating, veteran-insulting professional troublemaker with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Elks club, and even newspaper columnists!).
The columnist’s arguments were weak, but the nickname he gave me caught on. It was at this time that Sylvester Stallone’s action pic Rambo: First Blood Part II was in the theaters, featuring the fighting-for-truth-and-justice character John Rambo. So the Republic christened me “Janbo” for my efforts to defend Vietnam veterans. Soon after, S, an editorial cartoonist, drew a cartoon of me with an American-flag bandanna around my big hair, an ammo belt across my chest, and a machine gun slung over my shoulder. From then on, I was no longer just Janice K. Brewer. I had an official nickname: “Janbo.”
A couple of years later, after I had been elected to the State Senate, I got involved in another battle that gave me my first real taste of how badly the media can distort issues to suit their agenda. It was 1990, and Tipper Gore, the wife of Tennessee senator Al Gore, was fighting her good fight to warn parents about offensive lyrics on record albums. I had kids who listened to these albums, so I joined her in the trenches. I introduced legislation to require labels on albums with offensive lyrics so that no one under eighteen could buy them in Arizona. This would have an impact on such artists as 2 Live Crew and Ice-T, who were known for their obscene lyrics at the time. Record industry executives vigorously fought my bill. Longtime Arizona resident Alice Cooper lobbied me, and I remember how Donny Osmond, who was trying to toughen his image at the time, flew in from Utah to testify against the bill. He arrived at the committee hearing wearing a black leather jacket and black pants. The committee passed the bill, but I eventually agreed to put it on hold after I came to an agreement with the record industry that they would label albums with explicit lyrics—not just in Arizona but nationwide. So, as far as I was concerned, we had accomplished what we set out to do.
Not, however, without making some enemies in the process. While the legislation was pending, a writer from a small weekly publication in Phoenix began calling me, posing as Doug MacEachern, who was then a reporter from the Arizona Republic and today is one of their editorial writers. Under the pretext of talking about the bill, this “reporter” encouraged me to recite some of the offensive lyrics we were complaining about. I should have known better, I guess. But I was not then, and am not now, a distrustful person, and I believed in the cause of safeguarding our kids from this garbage. So I recited the lyrics—including the four-letter words and all of the awful, misogynist things that were polluting our children’s minds. The deceitful reporter had secretly recorded our phone conversations, and a couple of days later he showed up at the State Capitol with an 800-watt sound system on a flatbed truck with signs proclaiming, HEAR JAN BREWER TALK DIRTY! He then blared over the loudspeakers all the four-letter words and horrible lyrics I had read to him. Everyone at the Capitol heard me repeating these lyrics over and over again. It was embarrassing for me, but it was even more embarrassing to the profession of journalism. Classes on journalism ethics started using it as an example of bad, unethical journalism—a wonderful example of why journalists rank below members of Congress in American public opinion surveys.
In 1996, after fourteen years in the legislature, I ran for the Board of Supervisors of Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, where Phoenix is located. Maricopa County was facing bankruptcy and many of my supporters encouraged me to run against the Republican incumbent to get the county turned around. Despite its boring, bureaucratic name, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors exercises tremendous power and oversight. Maricopa County is bigger than seven states and has a population greater than those of twenty-two states. And when I was elected, the county was in very bad shape. Spending was out of control, and accountability was nonexistent. I’ll never forget what Governing magazine wrote just before I was elected to the board: “If Phoenix represents the best in local government, Maricopa comes very close to being the worst.”
Ouch. So we got to work. I was elected chairman of the board, and under the direction of a very talented county manager, David Smith, we began to make the hard decisions and make changes. We reined in spending. We made elected officials more accountable. We began the process of privatizing the administration of the failing county hospital. By the time I’d ended my tenure on the board, in 2002, Maricopa County’s turnaround was so complete that Governing came back to take a look. What they saw caused them to do a complete 180. They proclaimed it “one of the two best managed large counties in the nation.” Even the Arizona Republic, not exactly a cheerleader of mine, called it “one of the most stunning reversals in history [sic] of American governance.”
For much of America, Arizona’s tough immigration law seemed to come out of the blue in 2010. In truth, Arizona has been going it alone for more than a decade, since the fortification of the California and Texas borders pushed the majority of the illegal traffic our way.
By the time I became secretary of state, in 2003, Arizona was fast approaching the crisis point. After easing off a bit following the crackdown after 9/11, illegal entries surged in the middle of the decade. People started to notice the increasingly large groups of men hanging around the post offices and Home Depot stores looking for work. We started to see more and more traffic accidents involving uninsured drivers. Our hospitals began to be overwhelmed with immigrants who lacked insurance but needed medical care. The number of non-English-speaking children in the schools soared. But with the increasing numbers of illegal aliens looking for work there came another type of immigrant. And with these men came the crime, the kidnappings, the drop houses, and the steady loss of Arizonans’ basic freedom to live their lives in safety and security.
The federal government wasn’t doing its job to secure the border. But while Washington did little to ease the crisis, Arizonans didn’t sit still. And it is one of the reasons I love this state so much. We are compassionate, welcoming people. But we knew that if we couldn’t count on Washington to enforce the laws, we would.
In 2004, a ballot initiative called Proposition 200 was put before the voters. Prop 200 required individuals to provide proof of citizenship before registering to vote, required voters to provide proper identification at the polls, and required proof of eligibility to receive certain welfare benefits. In other words, only citizens should be voting, and only eligible people who are in our country legally should be receiving welfare benefits. Most of the business community, along with elected officials like Governor Napolitano, Democratic congressman Raúl Grijalva, and Republican senators John McCain and Jon Kyl, opposed the ballot measure. Nonetheless, Arizonans said yes to Proposition 200 by a significant margin. It passed with 56 percent of the vote—including 47 percent of the Latino vote.
I personally supported Prop 200, and as secretary of state I fought legal battles to see it implemented. In doing so, I had to fight not only Democrats like the governor and Attorney General Terry Goddard but some Republicans as well.
For me, the question was simple: As secretary of state, I had dealt with reports of voter fraud involving liberal groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) paying or fooling illegal aliens to register and vote. And the federal law was crystal clear: Voting is reserved for citizens, either native-born or naturalized. Who else had the right to determine the destiny of Arizona? Of America?
It was my job as secretary of state to implement the voting-eligibility requirements of Prop 200, and I took it very seriously. I knew that the right thing to do was to make sure that no one was denied the right to vote and that no legitimate vote was canceled out by an illegitimate one. So I threw my energies into creating rules to implement the new law. The Department of Justice cleared my new rules, and I moved ahead with implementation. I traveled up and down the state, speaking to civil rights and civic groups, educating people about the new law. Arizona voters had clearly signaled that requiring someone to provide identification to vote—just as we do to board an airplane or purchase liquor—was a legal and reasonable standard.
However, in typical fashion, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals intervened just a few weeks before the 2006 election and suspended the requirement to provide proof of identification at the polls. I immediately filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed with me and overruled the Ninth Circuit. The Supreme Court said that Arizona had a compelling interest in preserving the integrity of our election process. It was now crystal clear: When you show up to the polls to vote in Arizona, bring your ID. And in the end, through our hard work, we were able to avoid most of the name calling and acrimony that has marked other citizenship initiatives. Just this past June, however, the Ninth Circuit decided to review whether Arizona can require residents to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote. And guess who showed up to oppose us? You guessed it: the Obama administration. They filed a brief opposing our proof-of-citizenship requirement to register to vote, arguing that federal law preempts our state law.
As to Prop 200’s final requirement, prohibiting Arizona taxpayer dollars from going toward welfare benefits for illegal aliens, the issue was equally clear. My belief is that, with limited funds available to provide social services, those services should go first and foremost to citizens. Like other states, we have limited resources. And unlike most other states, we are being asked to support a huge, largely poor immigrant population whose presence in our state is due to federal failure. Arizonans made the perfectly reasonable, perfectly moral choice to prioritize their limited resources for their fellow citizens.
In 2007, Arizona followed Prop 200 with the Legal Arizona Workers Act, a law requiring that employers use the verification system E-Verify to ensure that their employees are in the country legally. If they fail to do so, they can lose their business licenses. Here again, Arizona was simply creating new tools to enforce existing federal law. It’s a federal crime for employers to employ unauthorized aliens. We all know how poorly this law is honored—and enforced—in most parts of America. Government winks and looks the other way while businesses exploit desperate people and power the magnet that drives illegal immigration.
Arizona could no longer afford to wink at employers who broke the law. So once again, we took matters into our own hands. The legislature passed the Legal Arizona Workers Act, and Democratic governor Janet Napolitano signed it into law. She took some heat for that (I feel your pain!), but, to her credit, she did what she thought was best for Arizona. The usual suspects filed the usual legal challenges, of course. But in the end, the people of Arizona had their voices heard. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal law does not preempt Arizona’s law against hiring illegal immigrants. Arizona can require businesses to use E-Verify and suspend the business licenses of those who hire illegal aliens. By recognizing that states have a right to protect themselves from the effects of the federal government’s uncontrolled borders, the Supreme Court’s ruling is, I hope, a sign of future rulings to come.
It was a warm Arizona evening in late October 2008 when I received the call that would dramatically change my life.
By then I had given twenty-six years to the service of the people of Arizona. I had changed a lot since I was that shy housewife discovering her inner pit bull in the parking lots of local grocery stores like Bashas’, Smitty’s, and AJ Bayless back in the early 1980s. I had had some hard knocks, learned some valuable lessons, and had some significant legislative and executive accomplishments. I had run for office eleven times and never lost.
The reason I’d never lost, I think, had to do with the ways I hadn’t changed in all these years. I still felt very strong ties to the issues and the people who had motivated me back when all I wanted to do was make a difference in my children’s education. I felt in many ways just like the citizens I had represented all these years, good people like Ralph Baskett Jr., the farmer who had given me my first campaign contribution. I had always made a point of listening to them to be sure. But I was able to really hear them because I had always been one of them. I was that girl in a dress shop, that lady in front of the grocery store. I understood the wants of the people who had put their trust in me and confided in me their desires, their needs, their hardships. God knows I’d had my own.
By the time the phone rang that evening in 2008, I knew the Arizonans I represented, and they knew me. I also knew that my state was in dire fiscal straits. Six years of overspending during the Napolitano administration had had its effect. As a percentage of our general fund, Arizona had the worst budget deficit of any state in the union. To get our state back on track, there was no question that doing the right thing would mean doing the hard things. Tough, unpopular choices would have to be made.
The voice on the end of the phone told me that Governor Napolitano was planning to resign after the coming election to join what was all but certain to be the administration of President Barack Obama. I was temporarily (and uncharacteristically!) speechless. Arizona has an unconventional line of succession in which the secretary of state (that being me at the time) is first in line when the governor can’t finish his or her term.
As I grasped the implications of what I was hearing, I almost laughed out loud. As a state senator in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had fought for a ballot measure to create the position of lieutenant governor to succeed the governor in the case of a vacancy. When our Republican governor, Evan Mecham, was removed from office in 1988, it was our Democratic secretary of state, Rose Mofford, who succeeded him. I felt that the person first in line to succeed the governor should be from the same political party. For six straight years, I fought to create the office of lieutenant governor. It finally made it to the ballot in 1994 for the people to decide. The voters, in their wisdom, rejected the measure.
It was a surreal, bittersweet moment. The Republican nominee for president, John McCain, was my friend. We had started our political careers together back in 1982, when he was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and I was elected to the Arizona State House. Now all the indications were that John was going to lose his bid for the White House. But his loss would be my gain. I was going to become the twenty-second governor of the state of Arizona.