Scorpions for Breakfast

by Jan Brewer

  I also couldn’t help poking some fun at the new Obama stimulus package. “[We] are planning a massive stimulus package of our own, to make Arizona the most economically vibrant place in the world,” I said. “And just like the clever folks in Washington, we have a catchy name for it: It’s called ‘freedom.’ ”

  I wasn’t joking about freedom. Not at all. I knew as deeply as I have ever known anything that only freedom could remedy Arizona’s troubles. It has always been American freedom that has lifted us up in tough times, and it will always be.

  I quickly got organized. I didn’t have a whole lot of time, and I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about the inner workings of Governor Napolitano’s administration. She’d had me in to the office only once to visit before I occupied it as governor. But I put together my transition team. I worked the phones, asking people to come help me, even if it could only be for a short time. I knew the kinds of people I needed: Arizonans who knew how to take charge of a problem and solve it in their own unique down-to-earth style.

  We could still fix the budget, but we’d have to move fast. I needed to dramatically change the way the state did business, because the traditional method simply wasn’t working. It was driving us into the ground. In my first official act as governor, I put a moratorium on all new state rules and regulations. I had to make sure that Arizona was the most economically vibrant place in the world.

  Next I reached out to people who actually knew how to do business and begged them to join us in our mission to create the best business environment in the nation. “Government doesn’t know how to do business,” I said. “Only business knows how to do business, and we need your help in order to overcome the bureaucratic and regulatory climate dominating our state government.”

  My faith in the Arizona business community was rewarded. Lots of good people left high-paying jobs in the private sector to come help me and the state of Arizona. They made considerable personal sacrifices and had the same desire to turn the state around—a desire to rebuild and reposition Arizona for the next one hundred years.

  That didn’t mean all of our problems were solved—2009 was a bad year, to say the least, with respect to the budget. I had a plan to fix the budget crisis—I had been down this path before. I thought we had the ability to change things if we did it right. After all, I had changed things in Maricopa County. I had a track record.

  I immediately tackled our budget deficit. Ten days after becoming governor, I erased $1.6 billion from our state budget deficit. Education, welfare programs, and public safety took the brunt of the cuts. Even though the cuts were the largest ever in Arizona history, our problems were far from over. We were now facing a $3.4 billion hole for the upcoming fiscal year.

  I soon learned that my track record meant very little when it came to getting my supposed allies in the legislature to agree with me. The legislature was Republican, and they were in love with me when I was sworn in. “We’ve got a Republican!” they said in celebration. They thought I was going to be a rubber stamp for their ideas. They thought I was going to go along with anything they proposed.

  They were wrong.

  It wasn’t long before I started to catch flak from Republicans in the legislature. When I didn’t turn out to be a rubber stamp for their plans, they were furious. I vetoed their proposed budgets. I line-item-vetoed certain elements of their bills. This was painful. These were my friends, some of whom I’d known for years. Eventually, down the road, many of them realized that the hard and unpopular decisions I had to make turned out to be the right decisions. I’ve since received apologies from many of them. But at the time, it was really tough. They were hell-bent to run the show and do things their way. And I was hell-bent on doing things the way I thought was right. They thought we were all philosophically aligned: I’m a conservative Republican, and this was a Republican legislature. But they wanted to tackle everything at once, and they were adamantly opposed to raising any new revenues for the state, regardless of the impact that the budget cuts were having.

  Yes, I wanted to cut spending—and I did just that, in historic amounts. But we had to take a hard look at revenues as well. Another $3.4 billion in cuts would be devastating to the areas of education, public safety, and the most vulnerable in our state.

  And yes, we also took federal stimulus money. On February 17, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 into law. I was in my car on the way to an interview when Senator Jon Kyl called. “I have good news and I have bad news, Governor,” he said. “The bad news is that the president succeeded in passing his stimulus package. The good news is that you’re getting a bucketload of money.”

  “I don’t need a bucketload, Senator,” I said. “I need a truck-load of money!” Then I got serious. “Jon,” I continued, “we have serious problems. I don’t know if we’ll get through this.”

  A few minutes later, during the radio interview, the host told me about other governors who were grandstanding and refusing to accept stimulus funding and asked if I would do the same.

  “What, and have the money go to Kentucky?” I asked incredulously. “I won’t bite off Arizona’s nose to spite her face.” In the end, all fifty states took the stimulus money.

  Several legislators who publicly proclaimed that we shouldn’t take the stimulus funds later begged to have those funds used to save their favorite programs from being cut. For them, it was like their own little cookie jar, but with no accountability for how the cookies got paid for.

  I shared many of the legislators’ reluctance to put any more burdens on the Arizona taxpayers. I had never voted for a tax increase in my twenty-seven years as an elected official, and I didn’t want to start as governor. But our backs were against the wall. Governor Napolitano had run up the deficit and then run out of town—but not before saddling Arizona with another rotten budget plan. I reached out to the best financial experts to go over the books, and they explained to me that they thought historic budget cuts and a temporary tax increase were the only ways to solve our budget problem. The issue we were facing was that we could eliminate all of state government except education, health care, and public safety and still have a massive budget deficit.

  I know the majority of Arizonans understood that, as governor, I had to run the government. How were we going to solve this? I pondered these issues for hours, days, weeks. My budget advisers insisted that there was no other way and that I needed to propose a temporary tax increase. I kept coming back to the same conclusion: “I can’t do it.”

  One night, I found myself emotionally spent, sitting on my patio in the middle of the night. It was two or three in the morning, and the desert air was cool. I looked up at the sky. “God, what am I going to do?” I asked. Then I made up my mind: “I’m going to do what is right.” For me it always comes back to basic principles. And my mother had told me over and over again that doing the right thing almost always means doing the hard thing. So I steeled myself and whispered, “Jesus, hold my hand. I’m going to do this for the people of Arizona. And if it affects my reelection and my political reputation, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t about Jan Brewer’s political future. It’s about Arizona’s future.”

  I went back to work. I told my staff to go back to the drawing board time and time again. I told them that we needed to get our state out of the hole, let the chips fall where they may. The budget we came up with slashed spending and included a temporary one-cent sales tax hike for three years to make up the massive deficit. The sales tax was the fairest method of raising additional revenue, affecting everyone equally, and we calculated that the temporary measure would raise $1 billion a year and protect the areas of education, health care, and public safety from even deeper cuts. Cuts would still be necessary, but this temporary tax would make these cuts less deep.

  The voters got it intuitively, I think. They knew me—I had twenty-seven years of credibility as a fiscal conservative.
Besides, voters are sensitive to politicians trying to have it both ways. They can see when politicians are trying to manipulate them to assure their reelection. It ran against my personal political interests to call for the tax hike. A friend of mine, Chuck Coughlin, summed up my position well. “She knew the tax was the only option on the table,” he said. “I told her she will have no friends, that not even the Democrats will help you, because they want you to roast in the fire. But she did it.”

  But the legislature wasn’t going to back down, either. They tried to outmaneuver me by passing a budget without the temporary tax, which would have decimated education, health care, and public safety. But then they wouldn’t send it to me. They just held on to it. They planned to wait and send it to me on the first day of the next fiscal year, believing I wouldn’t veto it and shut down the government. Instead of waiting, I sued them to force them to send me the budget. The Arizona Supreme Court agreed with me, but by the time the legislature actually sent me the budget, it was the early morning of the first day of the new fiscal year. Through careful line-item vetoes and outright vetoes of other budget bills, I avoided a government shutdown. But we still didn’t have a finished budget and I immediately called the legislature back into session.

  I kept pushing and pushing to get our budget in line. The entire Republican establishment opposed me. Democrats opposed me too, complaining that the proposed temporary tax hike wasn’t high enough. My poll numbers began to collapse. By the end of September 2009, my approval rating was down to 37 percent, from 51 percent in May. In potential election matchups, I was being beaten badly by the Democratic attorney general, Terry Goddard.

  Republican primary challengers started to come out of the woodwork—three of them, in fact, including a self-funded millionaire candidate. Great time to announce a reelection campaign, right?

  I thought it was, because my principles were on the line. And I was more than willing to put them before the people of Arizona. On November 6, I announced my candidacy for a second term. “When I took office, I inherited a budget deficit created from years of overspending and living beyond our means,” I said. “We have worked hard to start fixing this problem, and we have already made and proposed $1 billion in cuts—the largest cuts, my friends, in Arizona’s history. Some of these cuts were not easy, but tough times call for a tough leader.”

  In my announcement speech, I talked about my mother, who taught me the nature of hard work, honesty, and integrity. I talked about how being governor of Arizona was the second-greatest job I’d ever had—being a wife and mother was the greatest—and how I hoped I had made my mother proud. Most of all, I talked about the wonderful people of Arizona, who deserved the best government possible. I concluded by reading a note from John Adams to his wife, Abigail, in which he explained why he felt it necessary to go to Philadelphia to pursue his mission to serve as a delegate in the First Continental Congress. “Great things,” he wrote, “are wanted to be done.”

  “I believe I am the right person to finish the challenging tasks that are ahead of us,” I concluded. “And yes, the race ahead of us will be a difficult one. But I intend to win it. I intend to win it because great things are wanted to be done in Arizona.”

  Those great things could not wait for an election. They had to be done now, regardless of the consequences to my own political future. By February 2010, I was still asking the legislature to either pass the temporary sales tax or put it on the ballot for the voters to decide. I trusted the voters. So I asked the legislature to put the sales tax increase on the May 18, 2010, ballot. They refused, but I kept at it. The crisis was simply too urgent. Finally, after a year of battle, one of the legislators said, “Just give it to her. There’s no living with this woman until she gets what she wants.”

  Finally, I got what I knew was necessary. “At long last, the voters get a voice,” I told the Arizona Republic. “It is a voice key members of the legislature and I have fought for, a voice for our children and our future, and it was worth the effort. I truly believe that once you give the education to people, and you do the outreach, people will do the math and see there’s no other way.”

  But the fight wasn’t over yet. Now the measure had to go to the people of Arizona. I was more than comfortable living with their judgment. But the opposition was out in full force. Many of the legislators actively campaigned against the temporary tax. Both of our senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl, came out against it. I was so politically radioactive that after I complimented Senator McCain during his reelection battle, he said it didn’t count as an endorsement. Everyone thought the tax hike proposal was going to kill me. They asked why I couldn’t just leave well enough alone, why I needed to carry that political baggage. But I was convinced the voters understood that I was acting in the public interest, that I was doing the right thing, and the tough thing. The polls began to show that I was right. By March 23 my approval numbers had climbed back up to 41 percent. By April 14 I was leading my primary opponents as well as my main Democratic opposition, Attorney General Terry Goddard. The Arizona Republic praised my appeal to the public, drawing a simple lesson from my campaign: “Take a strong stand. Connect what they’re saying to their own lives and experiences. . . . [Governor Brewer] reeled in listeners by speaking their language, got them thinking, then got out of the way.”

  Arizonans weren’t stupid. They knew that the back-scratching deals between Governor Napolitano and the Republican legislature that had simultaneously cut taxes and raised spending were unsustainable. The politicians had gone home happy and content, sure that their reelections were safe. But the taxpaying citizens of Arizona knew the good times were over.

  In the end, the people of Arizona stood with me. On May 18, 2010, the voters came out in droves and supported the ballot measure in a landslide, with 64 percent support. Soon enough, my primary opponents who had been opposed to the measure began dropping out of the race.

  I knew my job wasn’t done, however. We still needed to cut, and we still needed to streamline government. But I knew—and I still know—that the people of Arizona are practical, wise, and honorable. We don’t back off our debts, and we don’t shirk responsibility for our spending. We stand together and do the right thing.

  Even as we made the hard choices on Arizona’s budget, though, another local issue was beginning to seize the imagination of the entire nation.

  For those of us who live in Arizona, illegal immigration isn’t new. It’s not something that happened all of a sudden. Our borders have been open for years, and our state and population have been the chief victims. More than 1,000 illegal aliens come across our border each day.

  I had known all of this for a long time. But after I became governor, it became my personal responsibility to deal with it. What’s more, illegal immigration into Arizona had changed in the past few years. The drug trade had taken over. Many of the people crossing our border were dangerous, violent criminals. Crime and violence had shot up in our urban areas, particularly in Phoenix. The costs of incarcerating these criminals and providing services to other illegal aliens contributed to a widespread feeling of being under siege. To put it plainly, my job was to protect the people of Arizona. If the federal government refused to do it, I believed, we were going to have to pick up the slack. I wasn’t going to allow the crime, the environmental degradation, the lawlessness, and the overwhelming costs of out-of-control illegal immigration to continue on my watch.

  I made the executive decision that everywhere I went as governor, I would call on President Obama to do his job—a job that only he could do—to secure our border.

  I began a campaign of imploring the feds to help us out. We kept asking for help, begging for help—and they kept turning a deaf ear. Even though Janet Napolitano had spent her time in Arizona fighting the same issues, as a member of the president’s cabinet she was now on the other side of the fence, so to speak. We asked them for the money that was owed to us for incarceratin
g criminal aliens. We asked to be a partner with the federal government, since we couldn’t afford to put the National Guard on the border ourselves. Here I was with a broken budget—$3 billion in debt—and I had to deal with a border blown wide-open as though with an invitation: “Y’all come in!”

  I had no choice but to put on the pressure. So I began writing letters to the Obama administration. Between March 2009 and June 2010, I wrote a total of five letters. Not one of them was ever really answered. I received a courtesy reply to my first letter, but the others were ignored entirely.

  On March 11, 2009, I wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, asking for an increased military presence on the border. I wanted at least 250 National Guard soldiers under the mandate and control of the Joint Counter Narco-Terrorism Task Force (JCNTF), using federal funding. “Our citizens must be protected from border violence,” I wrote. “Arizona and the other U.S.-Mexico border states continue to be confronted by a number of unique and disproportionate challenges relative to other states and we bear significant reimbursed costs in the public, non-profit and business sectors associated with border related challenges.” Secretary Gates never responded.

  In April, I joined all of the other border governors—California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, New Mexico’s Bill Richardson, and Texas’s Rick Perry—to request congressional leadership in putting more National Guard troops on the border. “Securing our border is a critical federal responsibility,” we wrote. The response from the Obama administration: nada.