Governor moving from border issues
What a difference a year makes. Last year, while running for a second term, Gov. Janet Napolitano was all over that hunk of Swiss cheese we call a border. So strongly did she feel about its shortcomings that she proposed spending $100 million in state money to crack down on illegal immigration.
This year, it appears, she has moved on.
"There are lots of things this Legislature should be talking about," she told reporters this week. "This should not be a session focused solely on immigration. We have transportation. We have water. We have education. We have health care. These are all issues that state legislatures and governors are responsible for. Immigration is primarily a federal issue."
So much is it now a federal issue - as opposed to last year when it was also a state issue - that Democrats are actually fighting off an attempt by Republicans to give the governor money for border security.
Republican Rep. Warde Nichols on Monday plans to introduce a bill that would hand the governor $10 million to put additional National Guard troops at the border, provided they are allowed to stop people from illegally crossing into the country.
The bill doesn't force her to do it. It simply gives her the option. An extra hammer, so to speak, in the old gubernatorial toolbox. Yet there were the Democrats, decrying the politics of it all.
"Republicans here at the Legislature are obsessed with making the governor look bad," Democratic Rep. Steve Gallardo said Thursday.
News flash: Republicans are always obsessed with making the governor look bad, just as Democrats are not above making those in the GOP look like lunatics. These days, neither one seems all that hard to do.
But this week, after being regaled with explanations about how it is that guardsmen now at the border can't stop foreigners trotting through our desert with AK-47s, it was advantage Republicans. "This is something we're going to allow the governor to do if she wishes," Nichols said, adding that the $10 million could be bumped up if she wants more dough.
Gallardo was practically sputtering in his response, explaining at least eight times how the feds are already working on the border problem.
"Let them do their jobs," he said. "The solution is comprehensive immigration reform."
He's right, of course. But unless we're offering amnesty to drug runners, I'm not sure how the possibility of comprehensive immigration reform coming out of Washington somehow someday solves the problem of heavily armed gunmen crossing with impunity today.
To her credit, Napolitano was instrumental in shaming the feds into bringing the National Guard to the border, even if they can't do anything more than dial 911 under the rules of Operation Jump Start. To her credit, arrests of undocumented immigrants are down by a third since the Guard arrived, meaning that a third fewer people are probably attempting the trip.
That leaves two-thirds still getting through, some of them with automatic weaponry.
A recent statewide poll found that most Arizonans want the Legislature to focus on illegal immigration this session. Fully 33 percent called it the most important problem in this state.
Now here comes the GOP-controlled Legislature with a plan that would give the governor the option of sending in troops that could actually do something about illegal crossings and the Dems complain that the Republicans are trying to make Napolitano look bad?
Seems to me they're actually giving her the opportunity to look pretty good.
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