Arizona’s Freshmen Reps: What’s Going On Here?

Kirkpatrick, Sinema & Barber all voted with the Republicans for CISPA

Is Steve Israel or Steny Hoyer calling the shots, or did Arizona’s three freshman reps reach these cynical heights all on their own? It’s hard to say, but my bet is on Israel or Hoyer. Or maybe it's the New Dem operation. Otherwise, it’s hard to fathom the votes we’re seeing from Kirkpatrick (AZ-01), Barber (AZ-02) and Sinema (AZ-09).

Regardless, the progressive base in Arizona (and, yes, there is one) is not amused. Blog For Arizona features a collection of progressive bloggers. At the start of the session, that group showed admirable restraint in the wake of Sandy Hook. Strangely enough, the reaction to that tragedy by Ron Barber, who took a bullet in Tucson two years earlier, was to pay homage to the Second Amendment. They could have jumped all over Barber, and few would have blamed them. Instead, they mounted a petition campaign to encourage Barber to lead the charge for sane gun laws. Barber actually responded positively for awhile, then went silent once out of the spotlight.

But the admirable patience of Arizona’s progressives has worn thin. It’s easy to understand why. Start with United Solutions, a supposedly "bi-partisan" group of freshmen reps that is about two-thirds Republican. And, no, we’re not talking moderate Republicans here. Joining the group were Arizona’s Kirkpatrick and Sinema. Here’s Sinema bragging about her membership (and lying about the composition of the group, which is far more heavily Republican than she lets on, and her role in founding the group, which was actually formed by lifelong Republican/New Dem Patrick Murphy and far right North Carolina Republican Robert Pittenger):



It was about that time that Bob Lord, posted this at Blog For Arizona: AZ Freshman Reps Sweep Gold, Silver and Bronze. Lord was referring to the Progressive Punch scores of the Democratic Freshman class. In that group, Kirkpatrick was worst, Barber was second worst, and Sinema was in a group tied for third worst.

Since then, the Arizona freshmen have continued to follow Steve Israel’s lead, or perhaps their own worst instincts, and the fire from the progressive community has grown more intense. Craig McDermott, who also posts at Blog For Arizona, wrote an open letter to the freshmen on the House Financial Services Committee, a group that includes Kyrsten Sinema, explaining that doing bad work for good reasons still is doing bad work. Donna Gratehouse at Democratic Diva expanded on McDermott’s theme, urging constituents not to be accepting of bad work, whether for good reasons or not. What had these freshmen done? Basically, they’d voted for legislation drafted almost entirely by Citigroup’s lobbyist, exempting vast swaths of trades from regulation under Dodd-Frank. A few weeks after the vote, Wall Street lackey and Democratic fundraising leader Joe Crowley led the freshmen on a tour of lower Manhattan, including receptions at both Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.

Pamela Powers-Hannley at Blog For Arizona has been more direct in her criticism of Sinema, actually titling one post, Sinema Too Republican? Votes to Reduce Banking Regulations, in which she implored progressives to put the pressure on:

Not only has Sinema not supporting the Robin Hood Tax, her recent vote exempts many Wall Street trades from any regulation. This is the wrong direction for the American people. How many Wall Street bankers live in CD-9? How many people who would benefit from the revenue generated by the Robin Hood Tax live in CD-9? It's time for Sinema to do the math. Voting with Wall Street is a vote against her constituents in Arizona.

If you live in CD9, it's time to call Sinema and tell her you thought you were voting for that fiery State Senator-- not the banksters' handmaiden.

We see you, Rep. Sinema

Powers-Hannley’s depiction of Sinema may have been too specific. She appears to be doing her best not to be just the banksters’ handmaiden, but the handmaiden of corporate America at large. Amazingly, she and Barber voted with the Republicans for the failed Farm Bill, which would have cut $20 Billion in food stamp assistance, a huge chunk of which is going to children. Here’s E.J. Dionne, explaining the rank immorality of the legislation for which Sinema and Barber voted:

The bill the House voted down would have cut food stamps by $20.5 billion, eliminating food assistance to nearly 2 million low-income people, most of them working families with children or senior citizens.

This alone should have been bad enough to sink the bill. But then Republicans pushed through an amendment by Rep. Steve Southerland, R-Fla., to toughen work requirements in the program. Work requirements sound reasonable until you look at what Southerland’s amendment was actually designed to do.

As Robert Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explained, Southerland’s proposal violated “the most basic standards of human decency” because it made no effort, as other work requirements have in the past, to create employment openings for those who “want to work and would accept any job or work slot they could get, but cannot find jobs in a weak economy.”

In fact, noted Greenstein, a longtime advocate of nutrition assistance, the amendment barred states “from spending more on SNAP employment and training than they do now.” And it created incentives for states to throw people off food stamps by letting their governments keep half the SNAP savings to use for anything they wished (including, for example, tax cuts for the wealthy).

In a more rational political world, progressives and smallgovernment conservatives might join forces to slash subsidies for agribusiness and wealthy farmers while containing market distortions bred by price supports. But when Rep Jim McGovern, D-Mass., proposed an amendment to restore some of the food stamp funding by reducing spending on crop insurance, it was defeated.

And Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., exposed hypocrisy on the matter of government handouts by excoriating Republican House members who had benefited from farm subsidies but voted to cut food stamps.

The collapse of the farm bill will generally be played as a political story about Boehner’s failure to rally his own right wing. That’s true as far as it goes and should remind everyone of the current House leadership’s inability to govern. But this is above all a story about morality: There is something profoundly wrong when a legislative majority is so eager to risk leaving so many Americans hungry. That’s what the bill would have done, and why defeating it was a moral imperative.

Sinema signing on to a bill that would leave Americans, including many children, hungry, is stunning, given her background. If you heard her stump speech during her 2012, you would know about the years she spent during childhood living in an abandoned gas station. That story was the centerpiece of her speech. Based on that experience, Sinema would explain, governmental assistance is giving people in need a hand up, not a handout.

Finally, just last week, the House Financial Services Committee approved H.R. 1135, a bill to repeal the provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that requires public companies to report the ratio of their CEO pay to median worker compensation. As expected, the Republicans voted in lockstep for the amendment. But five of the twenty-eight Democrats did as well.

The pay ratio reporting requirement was a threat to the exorbitant pay CEO’s currently enjoy. Allow folks to compare the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay from one corporation to another, and CEO pay might be brought back to Earth. That’s why corporations had been working overtime to delay and dilute the regulations needed to implement the pay ratio disclosure. And they’d been successful on that front. But H.R. 1135 would solve this little “problem” for CEO’s entirely. And the argument for the amendment truly is Republican-esque. The pay ratio reporting, you see, would involve too much paperwork. Here’s committee chair Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) defending the amendment, according to Emily Chasan of the Wall Street Journal:

"I assume there is an infinite number of ratios some investors would find helpful to their decisions," Mr. Hensarling said. Companies might as well be required to calculate the ratio of workers with or without college degrees, the ratio of old versus young workers, or the ratio of office supplies purchased from big box retailers to local suppliers, he joked.

The individual votes on this atrocity were not easy to track down, but here they are. And who was among the five Democrats New Dems whoring for contributions from America’s CEOs? Why Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, of course, doing her best to make sure the great-great grandchildren of America’s CEOs never have to experience life in an abandoned gas station.

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Minutemen-- Liars, Rapists, Murderers, Nazis... And, Of Course, Republicans

3 American Nazis with a toxic agenda- Gilchrist, Simcox, Hannity

Last week David Vitter's viciously anti-immigrant amendment was defeated in the Senate, 58-36, with 7 Republicans rejecting it and only the most reactionary Democrat in the Senate-- Mark Pryor-- crossing the aisle and voting with Republican anti-immigrant extremists. Vitter's amendment was meant to slow down the temporary grant of legal status or adjustment to citizenship status of immigrants. John Cornyn's poison pill amendment suffered a similar fate two days later-- 54 senators voting to table it, only 43 backing it (just Manchin and Pryor among Democrats). When you hear respectable Senate Republicans-- not to mention less respectable ones like Ted Cruz and Chuck Grassley-- ranting about their Quixotic quest for “border security,” it’s a legacy of how the Minutemen changed the ground rules of the debate. And no one has covered that development better than David Neiwert, whose spectacular new book, And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing The Dark Side Of The American Border paints the definitive picture of what the Minutemen plague really consisted of, rather than the propaganda pumped out by political grifters like Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Tom DeLay (R-TX), John Culberson (R-TX), and Phil Gingrey (R-GA) and anti-immigrant media shills Lou Dobbs on CNN and Sean Hannity on Fox.

Right after Neiwert's book was released, Dobbs', Hannity's and Tancredo's close buddy, a founder of the Minuteman movement in Arizona, Chris Simcox, was arrested and jailed for raping a series of prepubescent girls. Hopefully Simcox will get what's coming to him in prison. Unfortunately Dobbs, Hannity and Tancredo are still free and still doing great damage, if not to 9 year old girls, then to Americans in general.

Chris Simcox, co-founder of the Minuteman border watch movement, was arrested Wednesday morning for allegedly having sexual contact with three young girls. Phoenix police booked Simcox on two counts of molestation of a child, two counts of sexual conduct with a minor, and one count of attempted molestation of a child.

Simcox, 52, co-founded the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, an armed volunteer group who assigned themselves the task of securing the southwest border. The group’s mission was to prevent “the unlawful and unauthorized entry of all individuals, contraband, and foreign military” in to the U.S.

Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Tommy Thompson told Phoenix-based ABC 15 that authorities “developed probable cause to believe Simcox had sexual conduct with the girls, all under the age of ten.” ABC 15 reports Simcox has denied the allegations.

Before he founded the Minutemen, Simcox had a long history of working with children. In a 2006 USA Today profile, Simcox explained his first job was at a "a very bad high school in South Central L.A." Simcox then moved to work at a private elementary school where he taught kindergarten through third grade for 13 years before becoming a private tutor.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate-group activities, points out Simcox has been accused of child molestation before. His first ex-wife, Deborah Crews, accused him of pedophilia in 1998. "He tried to molest our daughter when he was intoxicated," Crews told the SPLC. "When she ran out, he tried to say he was just giving her a leg massage and she got the wrong idea.”

Dave's book begins with the story of one band of Minutemen who broke into homes to rob people, murdered a family in cold blood-- including a 9 year old girl-- and then loudly blamed it on Mexican immigrants. Not every Minuteman was a home invader, a murderer or a child rapist. But almost every one of them was a violent Nazi, KKK or militia militant. Heroes to the GOP, this was a group of murderous extremists, dangerous misfits and Glenn Beck-quoting racists who would have conversations like this, when, according to Neiwert's book, they didn't know informers were among them:

[Undercover journalist] Dave Holthouse listened as his fellow Minutemen explained their border philosophy: like Simcox’s old friend Craig Howard, they thought that a few well-placed rifle shots would solve the nation’s border problems.

“It should be legal to kill illegals,” said one of them, a sixty-nine-year old retired Special Forces veteran who fought in Vietnam. “Just shoot ‘em on sight. That’s my immigration policy recommendation. You break into my country, you die.”

His neo-Nazi compatriots nodded in assent. “I agree completely,” one of them said. “You get up there with a rifle and start shooting four or five of them a week, the other four or five thousand behind them are going to think twice about crossing that line.”

The locals down in the border area tended to not agree-- and to not support Simcox and his Nazi brigades. Border Patrol officials he interviewed told Holthouse that the Minutemen were "more hindrance than help because they so frequently called in false alarms and set off ground sensors."

“The Border Patrol didn’t want them, my community didn’t want them here, and I didn’t want them here,” said Ray Borane, the Douglas mayor who frequently crossed swords with Chris Simcox and the other border watchers. “All they succeeded in doing was creating hard feelings and spreading a racist message. The amount of media attention they received has been totally out of proportion to their actual impact. The Mexicans have a saying that I think applies quite well to the Minuteman Project: ‘It was all song and no opera.’”

Monday, just before the Senate started voting, Obama had a high visibility meeting with prominent businessmen who back immigration reform. He made the economic case for why reform would be helpful to the country. "All of these business leaders," he said, "recognize the degree to which immigration is a contributor to growth, a contributor to expansion, a creator of jobs, but they also recognize that the immigration system that we currently have is broken." He hit all the talking points:

We have a system in which we bring outstanding young people from all across the world to educate them here, and unfortunately, too often, we send them right back so that they can start companies or help to grow companies somewhere else instead of here.

We have a situation in which millions of individuals are in the shadow economy, oftentimes exploited at lower wages, and that hurts those companies that are following the rules, because they end up being at a disadvantage to some of these less scrupulous companies.

And so, all of us I think recognize that now is the time to get comprehensive immigration reform done -- one that involves having very strong border security; that makes sure that we're holding employers accountable to follow the rules; one that provides earned citizenship for those 11 million, so that they have to pay back taxes, pay a fine, learn English, follow the rules, get to the back of the line, but ultimately can be part of the above-board economy, as opposed to the low-board economy; and a system that fixes and cleans up our legal immigration system so that we can continue to be a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.

The good news is, is that we've got a strong bipartisan bill that meets many of those principles. As I've said before, it's not a bill that represents everything that I would like to see; it represents a compromise. And I think all the business leaders here recognize that there are elements of it that they might want to tweak one way or another. But it does adhere to the core principles that we need for comprehensive immigration reform, and now is the time to do it.

Just this past week, the Congressional Budget Office noted that this would end up bringing more money into the federal government. It would reduce our deficits-- people would be paying taxes. It would end up strengthening our economy, growing our economy. And so you've got a broad consensus all throughout the country, not just business leaders who are represented here today-- many of whom are immigrants themselves, many of whom started businesses and are now creating opportunity all across the country-- but we're also seeing labor leaders, we're seeing clergy, we're seeing people from all different walks of life saying now is the time to get this done.

Monday afternoon, the Senate voted 67-27 (with several supporters stuck at airports and on planes) to move forward with the immigration bill by further militarizing the U.S.-Mexican border and screwing with immigrants in various and sundry ways-- Democrats giving in to dozens of petty Republican demands in return for their votes. (One was to confiscation billions of dollars paid into Social Security by undocumented workers.) The Republicans who voted YES were John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC), Marco Rubio (FL), Jeff Flake (AZ)-- Gang of Eight members-- and Bob Corker (TN), Lamar Alexander (TN), Kelly Ayotte (NH), Jeff Chiesa (NJ), Susan Collins (ME), Orrin Hatch (UT), Dean Heller (NV), Mark Kirk (IL), John Hoeven (ND), Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Roger Wicker (MS).

And yesterday there was another Republican filibuster of the immigration reform bill. It was shot down 67-31, with every single Democrat plus 13 Republicanos voting to shut it down. That should be similar to the final vote, although Dems might persuade Chiesa (NJ) and Chambliss (GA) to cross the aisle as well and vote for reform. The Republicans who voted with the Democrats yesterday:

• Lamar Alexander (TN)
• Kelly Ayotte (NH)
• Susan Collins (ME)
• Bob Corker (TN)
• Jeff Flake (AZ)
• Lindsey Graham (SC)
• Orrin Hatch (UT)
• Dean Heller (NV)
• John Hoeven (ND)
• Mark Kirk (IL)
• John McCain (AZ)
• Lisa Murkowski (AK)
• Marco Rubio (FL)

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Former Republican Congressman Rick Renzi Is Finally Headed To Prison On Corruption Charges

You may have noticed that DWT spends a lot of time going after a few especially bad Members of Congress. If you're a regular reader, you see a lot of mentions of shady characters like Darrell Issa, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Buck McKeon, Michele Bachmann, John Barrow, Steve Israel, Louie Gohmert, Steve King, John Boehner, Miss McConnell, Joe Crowley... the worst of the worst from both sides of the aisle. When the blog got started in 2005, our focus was on people we rarely mention these days: Duke Cunningham, Tom DeLay, Mark Foley, John Doolittle, Dick Pombo and Rick Renzi. Cunningham went to prison on corruption charges; DeLay is out on bail while he appeals his convictions; Pombo was kicked out of office by his constituents; Foley resigned in disgrace and is trying to rehabilitate himself; Doolittle resigned in a trade-off with the Feds to stay out of prison (which is I think what Bachmann is up to now). And now-- finally-- Renzi is getting his due.

In 2008, after years of pussyfooting around (including being forced to resign from his committee in disgrace), Renzi was indicted on 35 criminal counts. And Tuesday... well, it depends which version you tune in on. Renzi's version is that the federal jury acquitted him on 15 charges. And that's true. But the jury also found him guilty on 17 counts including wire fraud, conspiracy, extortion, racketeering, money laundering and making false statements to insurance regulators. He turned 55 on Tuesday. He'll be sentenced on August 19.

Prosecutors said wire fraud, extortion, money laundering and racketeering each carry maximum penalties of 20 years in prison while conspiracy carries up to a five-year prison term. Making false statements to insurance regulators carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

Renzi, who turned 55 on Tuesday, left the courthouse without commenting.

“We are pleased that the jury acquitted Mr. Renzi on 15 counts,” his defense attorney, Chris Niewoehner, said in a statement. “We are disappointed by every guilty verdict. We will continue to fight these charges, including on appeal.”

Acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman said Renzi must now face the consequences of his actions.

“Former Congressman Renzi’s streak of criminal activity was a betrayal of the public trust and abuse of the political process,” Raman said in a statement. “After years of misconduct as a businessman, political candidate and member of Congress, Mr. Renzi now faces the consequences for breaking the laws that he took an oath to support and defend.”

The indictment charged that Renzi, while in office in 2005, held hostage possible parcel swaps involving public land proposed as the site for an Arizona copper mine unless it included purchasing private land owned by a former Renzi business associate, James Sandlin.

According to the indictment, an investment group agreed to pay $4.6 million for the associate’s land, and he then paid Renzi $733,000 for his help.

Renzi had been named Congress' most corrupt Member by CREW 4 times. Between 1989 and 2012 he raised $5,947,867 from campaign donors, primarily from the Real Estate, Insurance and Gambling industries. One of the counts he was found guilty of was looting a family insurance business to help pay for his 2002 campaign. Over all, he was convicted for using his office for personal gain, something that almost all Republicans and too many Democrats are also guilty of.

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Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) Who Once Voted For DOMA Is Getting Married To A Man Next Month

Here's one homophobic asshole whose mind Kolbe won't be able to change anytime soon

I had already ended my time as the pop music critic for The Advocate in 1996 when Arizona Republican Congressman Jim Kolbe came out as gay. But I still recall the stir around the magazine because they had decided to publicly "out" Kolbe after he voted for DOMA, which was meant to prevent gay couples from marrying. Since almost everyone in Washington already knew Kolbe was gay, the homophobic vote seemed especially hypocritical. Kolbe decided to beat The Advocate to the punch by calling a press conference and announcing he was officially out of the closet.

Within days of the vote on the Defense of Marriage Act, they began a blistering campaign on the Internet to compel Mr. Kolbe to disclose that he himself was gay, a practice known as outing.

The campaign reached its peak last week with a full-page ad in the Washington Blade, a newspaper that reaches a nationwide gay audience, calling on "all closeted gay and lesbian members of Congress" to "end your silence and defend your community."

On Thursday night, Mr. Kolbe spoke.

He also spoke yesterday-- at the Senate Judiciary Committee, this time urging senators to include gay couples in the immigration bill they're working on. He and his partner, Hector Alfonso, are getting married in May.

Kolbe, a Republican who represented the Tucson area in Congress for 11 terms, has a partner from Panama who had to leave the United States after his work visa expired, bringing his teaching career in this country to an abrupt halt. Under current law, Kolbe could not sponsor his partner for a family reunification visa.

Kolbe's partner was able to return to the United States from Panama a year later after obtaining an investment visa, which allows immigrants who invest in new U.S. businesses to live here. But Kolbe said the process was long and expensive, costing more than many people can afford to spend.

"Our laws should not separate American citizens from their loved ones for such unacceptably long periods of time," Kolbe told the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is holding a series of hearings on an 844-page immigration reform bill drawn up by a bipartisan group of eight senators. Among the bill's authors are Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.

The committee chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has introduced separate legislation, the "Uniting American Families Act," that would allow gay Americans to sponsor their foreign-born partners to come to the United States using family reunification visas. That controversial provision is not part of the sweeping reform bill, although gay rights' advocates are urging that it be included.

"While the bill you are considering is an excellent starting point for reform, I submit to you that it is still incomplete," Kolbe told committee members. "Families like mine are left behind as part of this proposal. Equally important, U.S. businesses and our economy suffer because of the omission of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families from the bill introduced last week."

Kolbe's come a long way since voting for DOMA, as has public opinion (not to mention France and Delaware, each of which legalized marriage equality earlier today)... but his party hasn't. The vast majority of Republicans in Congress are still hateful and virulent homophones-- or at least pretending to be-- and oppose marriage equality and immigration equality. Let's see if he can convince any of the Republican closet cases Congress-- like Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Aaron Schock (R-IL), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Dave Camp (R-MI), etc.-- to support the LGBT community even before being officially outed.

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La Reforma Integral De La Inmigración

Gang of Eight

Early this morning, 1:30 this morning, the Gang of 8 formally filed their immigration reform bill. The Senate's Know Nothing caucus of unreconstructed bigots and anti-Latino hatemongers, led by Ted Cruz (R-TX), David "Diapers" Vitter (R-LA), Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (KKK-AL), John Cornyn (R-TX) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is coordinating with Steve King's House Bigotry Caucus and Kris Kobach, the Mitt Romney advisor who came up with the "self-deportation" strategy that helped the GOP lose last year's elections. Their strategy is to use delays and parliamentary maneuvers to kill it, offering “poison pill” amendments aimed at breaking apart the fragile bipartisan group that developed the plan.

The tactics, used successfully by opponents of an immigration bill during a 2007 debate in the Senate, are part of an effort to exploit public fissures over core components of the comprehensive legislation introduced Tuesday by eight lawmakers who spent months negotiating the details.

...Conservatives are taking aim, arguing that allowing undocumented workers to remain in the country amounts to “amnesty”; that the border control steps are not strong enough; that the guest-worker program will undercut Americans at a time of high unemployment; and that the bill will amount to trillions of dollars in new federal costs.

Those factors make immigration reform “a heavy lift,” said Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a lawyer who helped Arizona draft one of the nation’s strictest immigration laws in 2008. “Twenty million Americans are unemployed or under-employed. At any other normal time, no one would breathe about amnesty.”

When writing his book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, Joshua Holland closed his chapter on immigration with a story about how Kris Kobach's anti-immigrant law has hurt Arizona.

In April 2010, Arizona governor Jan Brewer... signed SB 1070 into law. To say the very least, the bill was controversial.

Despite the fact that the federal government has exclusive domain over regulating immigration, Arizona’s law made being in the country illegally a state crime (it was only a civil offense on the federal statutes). It made transporting an unauthorized immigrant a crime. And it empowered police to detain anyone they suspect of committing those crimes.

...[W]hen reactionary xenophobia and economic reality clash, the latter always wins.

Reaction to the bill was swift. Within weeks of the law’s passage, two of Arizona’s largest cities, Flagstaff and Tucson, announced that they were suing to block the law. A boycott of Arizona goods and services was called. The Boston, Los Angeles, and Oakland city councils stopped doing business in the state, and, as of this writing, New York and Washington, D.C., were considering following suit. San Francisco and Boulder, Colorado, suspended all official travel to the Copper State. According to the Arizona Hotel & Lodging Association, nineteen conferences were canceled just in the first week after the bill was signed.

According to an analysis by the Immigration Policy Center, “If significant numbers of immigrants and Latinos are actually persuaded to leave the state because of this new law, they will take their tax dollars, businesses, and purchasing power with them.”

The University of Arizona’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy estimates that the total economic output attributable to Arizona’s immigrant workers was $44 billion in 2004, which sustained roughly 400,000 full-time jobs. Furthermore, over 35,000 businesses in Arizona are Latino-owned and had sales and receipts of $4.3 billion and employed 39,363 people in 2002, the last year for which data is available. The Perryman Group estimates that if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from Arizona, the state would lose $26.4 billion in economic activity, $11.7 billion in gross state product, and approximately 140,324 jobs, even accounting for adequate market adjustment time.

Again, the federal government has exclusive domain over regulating immigration to the United States, so Arizona’s law is unlikely to withstand legal challenges. But if it does, what follows would be utterly predictable: the state not only will lose out on tourism and international business travel, but a huge share of its workforce, both legal and otherwise, will also seek less nasty climes. Arizona will face enormous litigation costs, and local police agencies will start to complain that they don’t have the resources to enforce other laws. Brand Arizona will continue to take a pummeling, companies will face a whole new set of hiring challenges, and the state’s business community will start to complain. Eventually, the very same lawmakers who pushed the new law will admit that it didn’t work out as they’d intended.

I say this with the confidence born of past experience. In 2007, Arizona passed another tough “enforcement only” immigration law, which mandated the use of an (unreliable) electronic verification system and subjected employers to the loss of their business licenses for hiring the wrong people. It turned out to be a disaster that might rank up there with the Edsel or New Coke in the pantheon of boneheaded ideas.

The state had a very low unemployment rate when the law was passed-- it was, at least in part, a “solution” to a problem that Arizona didn’t have. Unemployment was at 4.1 percent when the law went into effect in early 2008 and had been at 3.7 percent when a judge upheld the measure a year earlier. By the middle of 2008, lawmakers were scrambling to undo the shock they’d inflicted on the state, as up to 8 percent of the population-- according to one estimate-- decided to hightail it out of Arizona en masse. The state faced new labor shortages, as well as a loss in demand from all of those worker-consumers. Eventually, the law was amended, in part due to pressure from Arizona businesses.

The people of Arizona learned the hard way that immigrants not only supply labor, but also demand goods and services in turn. In addition, they learned that newer immigrant communities have a mix of people with different legal statuses all jumbled together, and that when there’s a widespread perception that politicians (and citizens) are attacking immigrants, it doesn’t much matter that some people differentiate between those who are “legal” and “illegal”-- Arizona lost plenty of citizens and lawful permanent residents with that drop in population.

A University of Arizona study concluded that economic output in Arizona would drop 8.2 percent annually if foreign-born workers left the state’s labor force. “Getting rid of these workers means we are deciding as a matter of policy to shrink our economy,” Judith Gans, an immigration scholar at the university’s Udall Center, told the Wall Street Journal. “They’re filling vital gaps in our labor force.”

Arizona’s experience isn’t unique. In 2006, the town of Riverside, New Jersey, passed a strict immigration ordinance. A year later, the New York Times reported, “With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered.

Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.” The town was also hit with serious legal bills defending against several lawsuits. According to the Times, “The legal battle forced the town to delay road paving projects, the purchase of a dump truck and repairs to town hall.” The law was repealed a little more than a year after it went into effect.

Hazelton, Pennsylvania’s ordnance was blocked before being implemented-- but not before the municipality had spent $2.4 million in court costs. The town’s insurance carrier refused to cover the costs.

When Oklahoma passed a draconian immigration law, the Chicago Tribune reported, “Construction companies that relied upon undocumented laborers are having trouble completing jobs... And business is down sharply at the stores, groceries and restaurants that serve a Hispanic clientele.” Republican state senator Harry Coates told the Trib: “You really have to work hard at it to destroy our state’s economy, but we found a way... We ran off the work force.”

Tuesday afternoon, Obama got a sneak-peak. He issued a statement of support. But then, his entire career has been based around compromise: "This afternoon, Senators Schumer and McCain briefed me on the bipartisan immigration reform bill that they have drafted with their colleagues in the Senate. This bill is clearly a compromise, and no one will get everything they wanted, including me. But it is largely consistent with the principles that I have repeatedly laid out for comprehensive reform. This bill would continue to strengthen security at our borders and hold employers more accountable if they knowingly hire undocumented workers. It would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million individuals who are already in this country illegally.  And it would modernize our legal immigration system so that we’re able to reunite families and attract the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will help create good paying jobs and grow our economy. These are all commonsense steps that the majority of Americans support. I urge the Senate to quickly move this bill forward and, as I told Senators Schumer and McCain, I stand willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that comprehensive immigration reform becomes a reality as soon as possible."

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Republican Homophobia In Arizona? Jeff Flake Vs Matt Salmon

In 2004, when the GOP introduced a constitutional amendment to forever ban same-sex marriage, it failed to get the needed 2/3s majority in the House. 191 Republicans (+36 bigoted Democrats) voted for it. 158 Democrats and 27 Republicans voted against it. Three of the Republican closet cases-- David Dreier (R-CA), Mark Foley (R-FL) and Jim Kolbe (R-AZ)-- voted against it. Most of the hypocritical GOP closet cases, like Ed Schrock (R-VA), Denny Hastert (R-IL), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Dave Camp (R-MI), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Phil English (R-PA), and Jim McCrery (R-LA), voted for it. Rob Portman's son, Will, was still 7 years from coming out so, of course, Rob Portman voted for the anti-gay constitutional amendment. And then for DOMA. He's evolved now... after his son came out. But not all congressional parents of gay children have. Matt Salmon is a raging homophobe, an all-around bigoted hatemonger, a hero of the far, far right fringe of the House GOP. He has a gay son-- and he's still voting against equality for gay people. Listen to his son:




Salmon, a hate-filled anti-gay Mormon, is a freshman but his congressional homophobia goes way back to when he was in Congress between 1995 and 2001. He left Congress to run (unsuccessfully) for governor, losing to Democrat Janet Napolitano, who his vicious campaign accused of being a closeted lesbian. Aside from general right-wing claptrap, Salmon's first stint in Congress is best known for his unsuccessful attempt to get Ronald Reagan's face carved into Mount Rushmore. After losing to Napolitano he became a lobbyist for an Inside the Beltway telecommunications group. He was widely considered one of the sleaziest and most disreputable lobbyists in town, setting him up perfectly for another run at Congress after redistricting created a blood red seat in Mesa and the eastern Phoenix suburbs, AZ-05, which includes much of his old district and from which Jeff Flake was retiring to run, successfully, for Jon Kyl's open Senate seat.

Perhaps you watched Senator Flake on Meet the Press yesterday. Flake, also a Mormon gay-hater, has a very homophobic voting record but, unlike Salmon, he senses the winds of change that are blowing down the American highway. Oh, don't get me wrong, Flake is still pretty much a dedicated homophobic bigot-- if not as extreme as Salmon on the issues-- and has every intention of voting against marriage equality for as long as he's in Congress, but what he told Chuck Todd is that he realizes it's "inevitable" that the GOP will change to being less of the hatemonger party-- and perhaps soon.

Todd: Let me ask you on gay marriage. Could you support a Republican presidential candidate some day who supported same-sex marriage?

Flake: Oh, I think that’s inevitable. There will be one and he will receive bipartisan support-- or she will. So I think that yes, the answer is yes.

Todd: And where are you on this issue, you say it’s inevitable. Are you... Lisa Murkowski, a Republican colleague of yours called it evolving on the issue; are you evolving to use her words on this issue?

Flake: I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman I still hold to the traditional definition of marriage.

As you can see in the video above, Salmon likes his gay son-- but not enough to support equality for him. Interestingly, he broke with right-wing extremists who still insist God never created any gays and that it's a "lifestyle choice." In the interview, Salmon seems to endorse his son's assertion that he was "born this way." Which kind of undercuts the whole bigotry thing the Republican Party-- and Salmon-- are clinging to.

“I’m just not there in believing in my heart... It doesn’t mean I don’t have respect, it doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with some of the issues, it means I haven’t evolved to that station, Rob Portman apparently has.”

Sounds like Salmon thinks "evolution" is a good thing and that it's just a matter of time. It also sounds like he's a political coward more eager to please the extremist neanderthals who back him than to support his own son and do what he appears to already knows is the right thing to do.

Matt'n'Jeff, GOP Mormon bigots from Arizona with a message of deranged homophobia

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